Chapter 14: A TACTICAL RETREAT: RANDOLPH AND THE MESSENGER IN THE MIDDLE 1920S
By the mid-1920s, Randolph's radical project had foundered not because of his intellectual failings or the imperfections of the Socialist party, but because government and capitalist terrorism decimated the white Left upon whose support he counted. Randolph's appeal to the economic interests of the white working class had a certain adventitious realism during the labor upsurge of 1917-1922. The postwar repression, depression, and anti-labor offensive that destroyed American radicalism and vitiated the white labor movement also undermined Randolph's appeal. Garvey's reading of white attitudes, and his prediction of white behavior, were prophetic. Faced with repression and mounting unemployment, whites turned even more viciously upon blacks. African Americans faced a resurgent KKK, a massive upsurge of Protestant bigotry and obscurantism, and a mass of both races stupefied by a consumerism more fantasized than experienced.
By the time the Messenger expired in 1928, all of Randolph's cherished dreams lay in ruins. The idea of inter-racial or even industrial unionism had foundered on implacable AFL racism and craft exclusiveness; third-party political action was no longer seriously considered, while the two capitalist parties held out no hope for the Negro; expectations for Negro business lay shattered; and even Randolph's cause of the moment, the all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, lay in tatters.
Even as Du Bois moved relentlessly left, and Harrison increasingly emphasized racial consciousness, Randolph, while remaining in his heart a Socialist, resigned from the SP and turned the Messenger first into a general interest Afro-American magazine and then into the organ of the fledgling Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), an all-black union that Randolph hoped could affiliate with the AFL. Randolph enlisted arguments from his Socialist philosophy in the cause of a more specific crusade, but one in which he perceived a universal significance reminiscent of his Socialist hopes.
Afro-American radicals had achieved far more success by the mid-1920s in persecuting Garvey than in improving the racial or working-class environment in the United States. The split in the white radical movement caused by the war, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Red Scare was replicated within the thin ranks of African-American radicals, and exacerbated by the UNIA's debacle. Although Garvey's organization remained the largest mass black organization in the United States, the collapse of the Black Star Line and the Negro Factories Corporation, followed by the jailing and deportation of Garvey, crippled the UNIA and caused devastating infighting. Briggs, Fort-Whiteman, and Moore repudiated both the UNIA and the Socialists and affiliated with the Communist party. As the Messenger early perceived, this strategy proved a dead end. Although such acrimony among the African-American radical intelligentsia undoubtedly vitiated its impact, the masses of blacks ignored them all with impartial disdain.
By the mid-1920s, the ruling class had destroyed all potential nuclei of radical, countercultural interracialism. The IWW, the most strident and consistent interracial organization in the United States, suffered from more official and officially sanctioned terrorism and violence than any other organization, including the SP, the NAACP, the UNIA, or the FNF. By October 1923, with the IWW virtually destroyed and the progressive garment unions suffering a massive hemorrhage of members (which also afflicted the AFL), Randolph was heralding the AFL as "the real American Labor Movement.... It is unfortunate that it does not embrace all of the organized labor groups in this country, but such is impossible at the moment."[1]
Gompers addressed the black workers of America in the September 1923 Messenger. Although the AFL chief implicitly faulted blacks for not joining unions and acknowledged that the AFL accepted black members mainly to save white unions, Randolph enthusiastically greeted the unprecedented "message of hope, good-will and cooperation [sent] to the Negro workers through the only Negro labor organ in America--the Messenger.... A change in attitude on the Negro workers is destined to take place in the American labor movement. It is inevitable. Enlightened self-interest will dictate it." Randolph hoped that the messages of Gompers and of John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, would dissolve "the prejudices in the minds of the Negro workers against their white brothers."[2] Randolph placed his hopes on the AFL only after the destruction or vitiation of all radical alternatives. The subsequent history of the AFL and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters illustrated the desperate and chimerical nature of this hope. The AFL never offered a modicum of racial justice until the mass upsurge of workers during the Great Depression, the Wagner Act, and the CIO virtually compelled such action. In the Messenger's last issue, Randolph reiterated his futile calls for an industrial unionism that could effectively protect workers by organizing upon the same lines as modern industry. However, that same May-June number carried a horrifying account of how the capitalists were presently mauling the United Mine Workers, the AFL's largest industrial (and therefore inter-racial) union.[3]
The destruction of the Socialist party left Randolph politically as well as industrially bereft. In late 1921 the Messenger highlighted a report by the American Civil Liberties Union which stated that "Never before in American history were the forces of reaction so completely in control of our political and economic life.... There is nowhere in the country any effective political or industrial organization of the forces of resistance to reaction except in a few scattered localities and a few exceptional industries." Six months later the Messenger lamented that "the Socialists, Communists (of many varieties), the Socialist Labor Party, the Farmer-Labor Party and the Workers' Party, all various efforts of the wide working masses, are weakened and demoralized, powerless to beat off the savage attacks of capitalism." Before the 1924 elections the Messenger noticed a growing rapprochement between the party of white supremacy and African Americans in the North. "The Negro Democrat is arriving," it said, because Ku Klux Klan persecution had united blacks, Jews, and Catholics. Reflecting on the rise of liberal Democrats in the North, Owen claimed that "the Democratic party of New York has given more to the Negro there in the last eight years than the Republicans have given since Emancipation."[4] Although the northern Democratic party at the state and local level did aid blacks, Owen ignored the fact that voting Democratic in federal elections further strengthened the hand of the virulently racist Southern Bourbons who controlled the national party.
Although the Messenger backed New York SP candidates in 1924 (including Norman Thomas for governor, and black Socialist Frank Crosswaith for Secretary of State), it was despondent about the lack of real choice offered workers and African Americans. No party except the Socialists condemned the KKK, but the SP did not field its own presidential candidate. Owen claimed that the Democrats had somewhat improved while the Republicans had degenerated, so the two capitalist parties were about equally worthwhile (or worthless); but "third party advocates" confronted "an unanswerable argument" in the contention that a vote for a third party merely helped the worst of the two capitalist parties.
Commenting on the Farmer-Labor party headed by La Follette (whose personal record on racial issues was good), Owen injected some empirical good sense into his analysis, exclaiming that "it is not sufficient to say that because most Negroes are farmers and laborers that the party representing primarily farmers and working people is ipso facto the representative of the Negro." Owen noted that although some racially progressive forces backed the Progressive party, its most important union backers, such as the Machinists, the railroad brotherhoods, and the AFL, were racist and/or exclusionary. Moreover, the Progressive party "straddled" on the KKK; even the SP denounced it primarily because of "the overwhelmingly Jewish composition of the party." In Indiana, Owen claimed, almost all former SP members had joined the Klan. He concluded that as "there is little choice between the three" contestants, blacks must vote against whichever party the KKK locally controlled. Moreover, blacks should demonstrate political independence by voting for La Follette or Davis (the Democratic candidate) because their blind Republican allegiance had rendered them voiceless. Another Messenger article, however, advocated a vote for black New York Republican Charles Roberts, despite his mediocrity and intense conservatism, because blacks "must think in terms of both race and class in these times of political confusion. Some kind of Negro in Congress is better than no Negro there although we don't expect anything from him, which is just what we are getting from the whites."[5]
Citing the opportunism and equivocation of all parties on the Klan, Randolph lamented that "the Negro is a man without a party." The KKK had infected all parties in different sections of the country, so condemning it would lose more votes than it would win. Noticing the unprincipled scramble of even radical parties for votes, and remarking on the Labour party's dismal performance in England, Randolph said that "once in office or power, radical, liberal or conservative must carry on largely in the same old way.... Is it good or bad? That is not the question. The fact is it is."[6] In the United States, the Progressive party would advocate justice for the Negro no more than the other mainstream parties. Yet any third party increased competition for the votes of Negroes, which "enables the Negro to bargain effectively." The chief value of a third party "does not lie so much in the character of the party as it does in its mere existence. Of course, its value to the Negro or any other group, increases when it is liberal, since it forces the other two parties to become more liberal too." It was more important that the Negro recognize the class basis of politics "than that he should vote for any particular party. As a general proposition, it is a sound policy for the Negro to split his votes. All Negroes should no more vote alike than all white people should vote alike."[7] Although "the platforms of the three parties are not radically different in economic philosophy," a large La Follette vote would frighten the other parties into making concessions. The Messenger said that "the most striking evidence of the intellectual and political emancipation of the Negro will be the extent to which they bolt the Republican party in this election and vote for La Follette."[8]
After the election, Randolph disgustedly noted that the Klan, which "represents the basic American spirit--the spirit of bigotry and intolerance, the spirit to persecute and oppress the Negro, the Catholic, the Jew, the foreigner"--emerged the big winner. La Follette, despite his own sterling racial record, temporized on the Klan, refused to address a single black audience, and endorsed conservative Republican and Democratic candidates who detested him while ignoring the Socialists who supported him. "There is nothing in the vote which Senator La Follette received to justify the tactics he employed," Randolph said. Indiana Negroes voted overwhelmingly for Coolidge and probably for the pro-Klan Republican gubernatorial candidate as well. A rise in the price of wheat spelled ruin for La Follette because "farmers are only radical when the price of their product is low. They are more conservative than a Rotarian when their economic conditions improve." The SP was "too weak to count for much." Most depressingly, the outcome proved "that labor leaders cannot deliver the labor vote, that politicians have little to hope for or fear from the promises or threats of labor leaders. It demonstrates the weakness of organized labor in American politics."[9] Randolph lamented that the trend toward reaction was worldwide, infecting even the Soviet Union.
The Messenger perceived that the Communists offered no realistic alternative. Hoping for a unified Left, Randolph almost completely ignored the massive splits within the SP until CP antics rendered commentary imperative. Immediately after the jailing of Garvey, the Messenger attacked black Communists as disruptionists and "a menace to the workers, themselves and the race.... So utterly senseless, unsound, unscientific and dangerous and ridiculous are their policies and tactics that we are driven to conclude that they are either lunatics or agents provocateurs, stool pigeons, of the United States Department of Justice." The Communists were "industrially trying to wreck the American Trade Union Movement." Black Communists aimed "to wreck all constructive, progressive, non-Communist programs" on the grounds that they were petty bourgeois. George Schuyler, a major new Messenger writer, said that the CP, "in obedience to the bulls from Moscow," attacked SP influence among blacks. The Messenger ridiculed Briggs and his African Blood Brotherhood, speculating that "perhaps the ABB, in obedience to the edict of Moscow, is planning to hold a World Negro Conference with its six members."[10]
By the 1928 election both the Socialists and the Communists had so far disappeared that they evoked scant mention. (Randolph did boost the candidacy of Chandler Owen, running for major-party nomination for a Chicago-area Congressional seat, to no avail.) Meanwhile, bigotry and religious fundamentalism ran wild. Racism, once mainly in the South, "has now spread the length and breath of the country," Randolph cried. "Discrimination because of color is everywhere, so is segregation and industrial jim crowism. It is as hard to find an area free of race prejudice in America as it is to find a Klansman in the Vatican. Whereas the protagonists of racial integrity and white supremacy formerly carried on their propaganda with a certain apologetic attitude, they are now blatantly militant."[11] James Ivy noted that America was riven by a conflict between two cultures. "The Ku Klux Klan, the Fundamentalists, and the Nordicists" aimed at "a new dark age"; their fight against the teaching of Evolution was only the opening salvo in a campaign against Modernism, liberalism, and "enlightenment, as represented by science."[12]
Randolph, therefore, early recognized that the election would focus on cultural rather than economic issues. However, it would ignore race and instead pit Protestant against Catholic. So-called intelligent voters would, "with the utmost seriousness and sincerity, speak blandly and innocently of the Pope running the United States" should Al Smith be elected. Towards the end of the Messenger's last issue, Randolph lamented that neither party would help the Negro and, with a bit of sarcasm, endorsed Al Smith. "The Klan controls Alabama, which is Democratic, and it also controls Indiana, which is Republican.... Since it is immaterial to the Negro workers which party gets into office, it would be striking a severe blow at intolerance, prejudice and bigotry if Negroes should help send this Catholic gentleman to the White House.... The Messenger believes that a Catholic President and a mixed cabinet of Jews, Atheists, Negroes, and Indians, would be an excellent thing for the soul of America." With this sardonic comment, the Messenger fell silent.[13]
Socialism appeared in the 1928 Messenger only in James Ivy's witty and incisive book reviews, and then only as an idea which, however worthy of respect, was fundamentally flawed. While clearly favoring Socialism, Ivy denied that it would inaugurate utopia. Reviewing a book by Upton Sinclair, Ivy denied that workers were inherently egalitarian or just. Rather than being the angels that Sinclair and other Socialists imagined, white workers were "no whit better than their capitalist overlords who take so much delight in booting them in their rears." White workers oppressed blacks as horribly as the capitalists exploited proletarians. "The white worker possesses no peculiar virtue not possessed by his capitalist overlord; every darky knows this if Mr. Sinclair doesn't. And why Mr. Sinclair should shed tears over the mass of white boobs is beyond me. What he says about their exploitation is true, and has been true throughout recorded history. A horse may throw its rider, but there is always another to vault into the saddle."[14] Although Ivy criticized another author's hopes in a world federation on the grounds that it ignored the real divisions of race, class, nationality, and religion that divided people, he also claimed that war, like exploitation, was inevitable:
Man rather likes war. He glories in it. To him it is a sort of semi-hallowed lark; the supreme producer of thrills and heroes. People, of course, grow tired of a particular war, just as one grows tired of beefsteak or pork chops after eating them over a long period. But one would not say on this account that one did not like beefsteak or pork chops. To do so would be silly; yet because after three or four years of a war people grow tired of war, gabble about... the utopia of universal peace, mushy idealists fondly imagine that man has actually grown tired of war; that he is through with it for all times.[15]
Ivy likewise ridiculed the notion that society's ills could be "as easily solved as a problem in plain geometry" by a more equitable distribution of wealth. Socialists claimed that the lust for wealth constituted the chief motive of every person; Ivy, on the contrary, insisted that even in those in whom it predominated it was "mixed with other and almost equally powerful desires." When economic needs were met (or even before) competition would emerge in other areas of life. "When man's dominant desire was military glory, we had evil; when it was religion we had evil; when it was rank as a statesman we had evil; now that it is wealth we have evil; and if on tomorrow it is social service, we will continue to have evil."[16]
Ivy attacked Socialist economic-determinist orthodoxy in other ways. He praised Marx and Lenin, by renegade Marxist Max Eastman, as "a brilliant and penetrating criticism of the Marxian orthodoxy.... Mr. Eastman would put revolutionary theory on a psychological basis instead of a metaphysical one. He puts Freud in the place of Hegel." Eastman applied the methods of higher criticism, previously reserved for other sacred texts, to the Marxist cannon, and demonstrated the contradictions between Marxist theory and Leninist practice. Eastman "attempt[s] to make social revolution scientific" and "divert it of its present religious togs."[17]
Ivy also decried the identification with and worship of wealth and power that characterized workers of both races. Americans, he said, basked in their presumed status as citizens of the world's richest nation; yet the nation's wealth was shared by very few. The richest 1% of the population owned 33% of the wealth and received 20% of the national income; the poorest 25% of the people received only 3.5% of that income. The workman, Ivy said, must recognize
his actual position in a capitalist society. Just as long as he continues to believe that on some not too distant tomorrow he too may be a Ford or a Rockefeller, just so long will he lack class consciousness, and just so long will he prevent the creation of a real working-class labor movement. It is the enormous wealth of America that lures our working class into a sodden sleep of fancied equality with the plutocrats. American laborers remind one of some Negro chauffeurs whom I have heard refer to their masters' Rolls as "our Rolls". "We have a Rolls Royce, and a Packard too you know." "We produce so much of this and so much of that; and we have more money than anybody else in the world, says the American laborer.[18]
Although Ivy did concede that "creature comforts here are not so hard to obtain," his analysis focused not so much on Sombart's "shoals of roast beef and apple pie" as on working-class hopes and illusions, and their sense of identity with both their masters and their masters' country.[19]
In the face of the destruction of the Left and the consequent lack of realistic options, the Messenger markedly changed its character by late 1923. It dropped its self-identification as a radical and scientific publication for both races and instead proclaimed itself "The World's Greatest Negro Monthly" and the "New Opinion of the New Negro." Previously, the Messenger had championed free immigration, despite its recognition that it lowered wages and that the wartime restrictions on immigration had facilitated the Great Migration of blacks northward--a trend Randolph greatly favored. In 1920 Randolph had proclaimed "Of course, the Messenger welcomes all peoples to the shores of America.... Immigration is not a menace to the workers' standard of living, unless labor fails to organize the immigrants. Every worker, black and white, has a right to go anywhere he pleases." Randolph repeatedly praised the cultural and political contributions of immigrants (more radical than native-born whites) and reminded his readers that blacks were most oppressed in those sections with the fewest immigrants, and best treated in areas where newcomers were concentrated. By 1924, however, the IWW--the union which most aggressively organized immigrants--was a shambles, and individual and group selfishness reigned supreme in society at large. In August of that year, therefore, the Messenger advocated totally banning immigration, which "overfloods the labor market, resulting in lowering the standard of living, race riots, and general social degradation." Ignoring his previous internationalism and the interests of the immigrants themselves, Randolph patriotically and parochially claimed that "excessive immigration is against the interests of all races and nationalities in the country--both foreign and native."[20] (Ironically, the racism of Alice Paul, head of the National Woman's party, motivated by a similarly myopic selfishness, estranged Randolph from a major expression of 1920s feminism.)[21]
Even before the 1924 elections, the November 1923 Messenger had marked a conservative new departure. This "Negro Business Achievement Number" was filled with articles (some written by notorious black reactionaries such as Moton and Scott, whom the Messenger had previously excoriated), praising black entrepreneurs.[22] Randolph asserted that the success of many race businesses belied Garvey's claim that only the UNIA had launched significant black commercial enterprises; the Business Achievement number would therefore dissolve "the least particle of belief in the Garvey myth." Yet Randolph also appropriated part of Garvey's message of racial pride, saying that "millions of dollars invested in legitimate businesses by Negroes have been a veritable inspiration to the Negro masses." Abruptly reversing its previous stance, the Messenger proclaimed that "superficial radicals frequently say that there is nothing in common between the employer and employee. To deny such a statement is heresy; to refute it by a well reasoned argument is sacrilege." It now claimed that Afro-American capitalist enterprises employed blacks in responsible positions and recycled their profits within the black community. Black capitalists, unlike white ones, mingled with their black customers in segregated neighborhoods and community institutions.[23]
The "Negro Business Achievement" number touted black business (including cooperatives) as a salvation for the race. A black insurance executive asserted that "the present trend of society is away from capitalism and toward cooperation [and] the development of people's institutions, where the sway of the capitalist and the influence of monied men does not dominate. Within the ranks of the Fraternal Insurance society, the Negro is to learn that he can organize and operate financial enterprises on the cooperative plan." Through Afro-American coops, blacks kept their money within the community and "tapped the power of the dominant race at its very roots." Another insurance executive appropriated the language of racial uplift in support of "the gospel of Life Insurance." Expressing the spirit of the 1920s, he proclaimed that economic development was as vital as religious, social, and educational progress in uplifting any race. Black life insurance companies "are bringing together the small sums which would otherwise be wasted or misapplied.... These millions are systematically and scientifically reinvested in the race and will ultimately command the respect and admiration of the other races of the world.... In this age of financial progress when men are measured by their wealth as well as their character, it stands to reason that races will be measured likewise." Black insurance companies (and banks) also lent to blacks and thus constituted "a reservoir of power.... the backbone of the structure upon which we, as a race, must rise." Life insurance agents, he said, "have consecrated their lives to the great mission." (The Messenger later added that "the growing army of Negro brain workers... have no hope of even a starvation wage without a corresponding growth of Negro business.") Randolph also criticized poor service, high prices, and exploitative practices in Afro-American businesses, however, and recommended that their black employees organize into unions.[24] In a significant indication of the changing nature of his support, in January 1924 Randolph thanked black businessmen for their support before praising white labor unions. The Messenger later added a column, "Negro Business," by George S. Schuyler.
By the time of the Messenger's demise, however, Randolph had in effect repudiated his emphasis on Negro business. Indeed, he may have emphasized the group economy in the previous few years only as a foil to Garvey. In a long article in the penultimate issue of the Messenger, Thomas L. Dabney pointed out that race-owned and race-oriented businesses could neither employ black workers nor provide jobs for educated African Americans. Black entrepreneurs could not replicate the days of early industrialization when unlimited access to free land, relatively wide opportunity and open competition, and, most crucially, government support had fostered the rise of the modern corporation. By the 1920s, trusts, oligopolies, and chain stores relentlessly crushed small businesses, and made starting a company on a shoestring impossible. The small niches in which black enterprises could flourish "are so few and of so little social value that the Negro cannot hope to achieve the desired goal in such business lines. Barber shops, hair dressing parlors, peanut stands, boot black stands, restaurants, millinery shops, bakeries, laundries, cigar stands, newsstands, boarding houses and other small businesses in which Negroes are engaged, offer little relief from unemployment for the Negro masses. Neither do they begin to offer clerical positions for our high school and college graduates."[25]
Nor, Dabney continued, would race businesses prosper on the basis of group pride or solidarity. "Negroes like other people are influenced more by prices and convenience than by race in the matter of buying. This practice is dictated by every consideration of economics and finance. Hence the appeals to race pride, while strong and feelingful, give way sooner or later to financial and economic conditions of the consumer, no matter who he may be."[26]
In his valedictory editorials--the same ones in which he despaired of political action, decried the lack of meaningful unions, and lamented the rising tide of racism--Randolph issued his parting words on the group economy. He agreed with Dabney that Negro enterprise was doomed not because of its color but because "Negro business is small business, and the day of small business is doomed." Even if petite black capitalists somehow combined into viable large enterprises, they would only exploit workers just as other capitalists did. White workers were mostly paid "starvation wages" and were "thrown on the scrap heap at earlier and earlier ages." Randolph proclaimed that "the Messenger has been very fair to Negro business... It has carried a score of articles on every phase of Negro business from farming to manufacture" because it realized from its founding in 1917 that "all other phases of the so-called race problem" depend upon "the economic life of the race." However, in a return to his earlier view, Randolph now insisted that only the consumer cooperative could improve the welfare of the mass of blacks. "It is," he said, " a democratic method and has the added value of benefitting all of the Negroes rather than a few."[27] However, Randolph admitted that cooperatives were virtually absent in the black community.
In December 1923 the Messenger, reflecting the Harlem Renaissance's displacement of political insurgency onto literary experimentation, announced it was "beginning to specialize in the theatrical field" because, as its dramatic critic Theophilus Lewis announced, good criticism was essential for great art.[28] In 1924 the Messenger, emulating the Crisis and the defunct Crusader, graced its covers with pictures of attractive African-American women. In the mainstream white press, it proclaimed, "the buffoon, the clown, the criminal Negro will be seen, but seldom the Negro of achievement, culture, refinement, beauty, genius and talent." The Messenger would show "in pictures as well as writing, Negro women who are unique, accomplished, beautiful, intelligent, industrious, talented, successful. We are going to take them by states, displaying two or three pages of these women artistically arranged each month."[29] In an age where class-based popular insurgencies were dead and the flapper represented women's liberation, the Messenger sought a wider popularity.
By the mid-1920s, therefore, Afro-American insurgencies had suffered the same fate as the larger, multiracial Left. Garvey was in jail and his organization fractured; the ABB and the Crusader were defunct; Hubert Harrison lacked an influential organizational base or stable organ; the Challenge and the Veteran had long since folded; and the circulation even of the NAACP's Crisis had plummeted. Randolph's Messenger and his Friends of Negro Freedom were also experiencing hard times. Randolph responded by turning the Messenger into more of a general interest magazine, featuring a regular sports column that focused on events of particular interest to blacks, a Negro business column, and satire, cartoons, and literature of general race interest. Nonetheless, like other homeless leftists, Randolph searched for a more focused, single-issue reform where he could advance his ideas on a more concrete level. He found it in the cause of the much-abused Pullman porters, an all-Negro workforce.
In 1925, frustrated officials of Pullman's company union, the Pullman Porters Benevolent Association (PPBA), recognized that the Pullman Company would unstintingly deceive and exploit porters unless stopped by organized power. One of these porters invited Randolph to an exploratory meeting on June 25, 1925, where Randolph and three veteran porters decided to form an independent union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP). The Messenger featured two long articles detailing porter grievances in its July and August issues, which, Randolph claimed, "aroused porters throughout the country." Randolph then addressed the Pullman Porters' Athletic Association on August 25, denouncing the Pullman Company and its ersatz union. Randolph became the BSCP's general organizer because he was known for "his long advocacy of the cause of organized labor," edited a national magazine (the Messenger quickly became the BSCP's official organ), and was not himself a porter (and was therefore immune from Pullman Company reprisals). He also recruited Frank Crosswaith as his special assistant. With help from the NAACP, Socialist-led garment unions, and the AFL, Crosswaith had recently founded the Trade Union Committee for Organizing Negro Workers, a bridge between blacks and organized labor. Crosswaith recognized that the BSCP offered enhanced opportunities for achieving this goal. Other important BSCP officials, especially local organizers, were recruited from porters or ex-porters fired for union activity.[30]
From the beginning, Randolph used ideas developed in the radical movement as arguments for the BSCP, and also linked the porters' specific grievances with larger racial concerns. The Messenger asserted that the porters represented "the best of the race," college graduates with training for medicine, the law, and other skilled vocations, who were excluded by white racism from the practice of their professions. They worked, Randolph said, "with closed lips and bursting hearts." Randolph attacked the porters' long hours (the longest of any American workers) and starvation wages, a mere 40% of what the U.S. government said was necessary for survival. ("No doubt your cigar bill is more than this," Randolph told a Pullman official). Porters were humiliated by customers and Pullman officials, subject to instant dismissal without due process, and denied all prospect of advancement. "No hope is held out to the Pullman porter. Once a porter, always a porter.... Every other class and race of workers" was rewarded with promotion; "white men who have little or no education have risen to the place of superintendents in the service, and Negro porters with a college education cannot even become a conductor," even though they often did conductor work. Randolph complained that the porters were in some respects worse off than slaves and that no group of white workers would tolerate such oppression.[31]
Randolph especially attacked the practice of tipping as inherently humiliating "professional begging," even if some porters did not recognize their degradation.
The fact that he or she does not regard professional mendicancy as degrading is one of the strongest reasons for abolishing the condition which makes it necessary; for it simply shows that the system is gradually dehumanizing him, converting him into a piece of inanimate equipment of the cars, insensible to the things that bring a flush of shame to the cheek of more manly men. In the nature of things, tiptakers can seldom develop the spirit of manhood of tip-givers. A tip-taker for a living, is compelled to giggle when his heart is well-nigh breaking with sorrow. He frowns and bends his knee in order to induce a feeling of generous geniality in prospective tippers, for herein lies his bread and butter. But fawning and singing and grinning and doing a buck and wing are not necessary elements of good service.
Tips were irregular and kept a porter in perpetual insecurity, with no means of planning his finances; if they were as high as the Pullman Company claimed, why did the company not collect them and pay porters a living wage? "The Brotherhood will destroy the obligation psychology," Randolph vowed.[32]
An independent union of, for, and by the porters was the only remedy for these grievances, Randolph emphasized. "A half century of exploitations of the Pullman porters by the Pullman company is irrefutable proof that the porters cannot rely upon the sympathy and good will of the Company," he said. "Organization, education and agitation is the only hope of the Pullman porters." Porters, like white railroad workers, "will never get justice until they have the power to demand it; and they will never have the power to demand it until they are organized." Randolph reminded the porters that "the Pullman stockholders have a union--namely, the corporation. It looks out for the interest of the stockholders. The officials of the corporation... represent them" and cannot represent the porters, whose interests contradict theirs. Randolph urged that with organization porters "can dignify their jobs. They can make them respected. At present they are the monkeys of the service. They are expected to sing and cut up capers as are unbecoming to a man.... This is not only an a disgrace to the porters, it is an insult to the race. The Company would not think of requesting any other group of workers in the service to carry on such monkey foolishness for the travelling public. Nor would the public expect it of any other group."[33]
Refurbishing his old radical rhetoric for use in a more specific cause, Randolph also attacked the "obligation psychology" fostered by the Pullman Company's welfare capitalism, epitomized by its PPBA. In language borrowed directly from the IWW, Randolph excoriated Pullman's sick and death benefits as "hokum" which the porters could find "in any insurance, fraternal or benevolent society which is unrelated to the company. Besides if they got proper wages they could plan for themselves. Moreover, even if the company gives sick and death benefits to the porters, that is no reason why they should not organize. For in fact the company is not giving them anything. The porters are giving sick and death benefits to themselves, but they don't know it." Because Pullman Company benefits tied workers to their job, these "benefits" constituted "real feudalism." The Pullman Company bragged that it helped porters whose families were in need, Randolph complained, but if the porters were adequately paid, they would not require such charity. Furthermore, company welfare workers (highly paid, coopted blacks recruited from the ranks of the porters) snooped into the most private affairs of the ordinary porters; according to Randolph, the Pullman Company knew when a porter had chicken for dinner. The Company rewarded porters with long and distinguished service with sergeant stripes, but "rights which the company is bound to respect are more important than stripes which only represent an empty honor." Randolph also used IWW rhetoric when he stated that the BSCP Convention would constitute "our economic legislature, legislating for the economic welfare of the porters."[34]
Randolph emphasized that the Pullman grievance procedure and the wage conference were likewise empty shams. The porters' representatives on grievance committees had no real power because company representatives dominated the committees; even when these biased organizations ruled in favor of a porter, the company often over-ruled them. Pullman officials were judge, jury, and prosecutor during disputes; Randolph denounced this as "an unethical, un-American and inconceivably unreasonable policy." The porters' representatives to the periodic wage conferences were often elected by intimidation and fraud, and were in any event powerless in the face of company domination. When the wage conferences did award minor increases, Randolph reminded the porters that the white railroad brotherhoods kept their unions despite their far higher wages. Furthermore, BSCP pressure, not the cage conference, was responsible for the increases. "Don't thank the Pullman Company; thank the Brotherhood. You never would have gotten anything were it not for the union." In April 1926, comparing the 8% wage increase granted the porters with BSCP initiation fees and dues, Randolph asserted that "if [the BSCP] got nothing more for the porters within the next two years, [the porters] have realized over a hundred percent on every dollar they will have invested in the union in the next two years."[35] Randolph also credited BSCP pressure with eliciting amelioration of some of the most egregious workplace abuses.
The Pullman Company employed the same tactics of "divide and rule," and of subsidizing black organizations and publications, of which Randolph had long complained. It threatened longtime porters with replacement by recent Southern migrants or Filipinos, purchased the support of mainstream black newspapers (including the Chicago Whip and the Chicago Defender), and distributed these papers free to the porters; it hired blacks as high-paid "welfare workers" and spies, and paid other blacks to Red-bait and slander Randolph and the BSCP as a Communist conspiracy against American institutions. Although Randolph secured the support of the NAACP and of many black churches and leaders, the Messenger complained that "strangely enough, the greatest opposition is not coming from a side frankly antagonistic to us; but from the very ones who would benefit most from a successful issue." Randolph responded sometimes with forbearance: "Let us not hate our detractors, for they must be saved with the expansive and redeeming love of the Brotherhood." Occasionally, however, he responded with blood-curdling rhetoric reminiscent of Garvey, as in his statement that the "slacker-porter" was "a traitor to himself, his family, and his race." A ranking BSCP official threatened "a day of reckoning when traitors of the race will come in for a full measure."[36]
Indeed, Randolph and other BSCP officers, using Garvey's language, excoriated the porters (and Afro-Americans in general) as largely responsible for their own problems. The cause of porter misery was not the Pullman Company but "the sheer, downright lack of manhood, of stamina, of guts and spirit on the part of the Pullman porters for the last fifty years," which was manifest in their "distrust of the ability of the Negro to do the things of a white man." Blacks too often "put all of our burdens and difficulties on the bent back of race and color, seeking an excuse for our lack of push, determination and will to succeed. Of course, race and color are factors in influencing our condition. But they are, by no manner or means, all. If we are real, red-blooded, he-men, we should not whine and cry over our lot, for it is within our own power to change it."[37]
Unity was essential. "Show that you have a higher sense of race solidarity," Randolph urged the porters. "Whencesoever we have come, we have a common heritage, common source, common interests and common enemies. Thus ours should be the slogan: each for all and all for each.... Demonstrate for once that you have spirit, guts, independence, manhood and the will to be freemen."[38] When the Pullman Company violated its own racial precedents and seniority rules by ostentatiously placing Filipino porters on the cars, Randolph told porters that the Filipino scare was but a ploy. The Pullman Company knew "the efficiency of the Negro worker who is the basis of its prosperity. The Company is not foolish enough to experiment with the producers of the only thing it sells--service, by employing a group of workers alien in language, customs and manners to the American public."[39] Randolph cited widespread public support for the BSCP, reminded the porters that all white railroad workers had successfully unionized, and asserted that, in any event, "it is better to maintain your manhood and get off the Pullman cars than to kow tow and lick the boots of the Pullman Company for a few crumbs which any other group of self-respecting men would reject. Negroes in the Pullman service had jobs before they went into the service and they can get jobs if they leave it."[40]
Randolph also addressed the issue of radicalism and Communism. When Red-baited, he proclaimed that he was a Socialist but that the BSCP fight was "not a political question, but an economic one". If doing "what every ordinary white trade union does," fighting for higher wages, "is radical, then we plead guilty." Randolph reiterated his anti-Communism and said that "the new porter is not a Communist, but a simple trade unionist, seeking only to become a better and a more useful citizen by securing a higher standard of living and preserving his manhood." He repeatedly characterized Pullman's starvation wages and autocratic labor policies as "un-American and in opposition to American traditions." In language strikingly reminiscent of that he had previously used when describing Socialism, Randolph said that the BSCP "is no far fetched, airy, impractical, visionary scheme but a sane, sober, sound, practical plan of action, borne out by the experiences of the workers over well nigh a century."[41]
In line with the "New Unionism" that characterized the Twenties, Randolph often claimed that the BSCP would benefit the Pullman Company. "Modern economic history irrefutably proves that union labor raises, instead of lowering production" he claimed. The BSCP "is not the enemy of the Pullman Company, but its friend.... It will save the enormous cost of high turnovers and secure a high type of porter who will improve the service and increase the income." Randolph claimed that "increased productive efficiency can only result from [the porter's] increased physical, moral and mental efficiency, which rest directly upon a higher standard of living, which in turn, can only be secured by a higher, regular income." Utilizing traditional values, Randolph said that "there can be no true home life when one is forced to fill his house full of strangers [boarders] for gain. It is morally unwholesome for children. In an unguarded moment, however, Randolph revealed his real sentiments when he called the Pullman Company "the enemy" who "has weakened and is ready to surrender." Furthermore, despite his disavowals, Randolph definitely envisioned a role for the porters in management.[42]
Clearly the BSCP could advance Randolph's long-sought economic education of the Negroes and the unity of black and white labor. The BSCP, Randolph claimed, gave blacks their greatest education in economic realities since emancipation. "Never before the advent of the Brotherhood has any systematic, definite, comprehensive agitation for economic labor organization as a method of solving the race problem been conducted among Negroes," he said. "Thus, the movement to organize the Pullman porters and maids has been a national school in economics for the race." Before this, he said, Negro education fostered either manual training or a useless classicism, while black organizations were religious or fraternal rather than economic. The BSCP, he proudly said, brought world-famous white intellectuals to address its members.
Randolph also proclaimed that although "Negro workers have fought nobly in the ranks of white workers in long industrial struggles, they have not known what it means to have the responsibility for the moral and financial maintenance of a struggle. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters is supplying this first experience." The Negro public also must experience struggle and sacrifice for its workers; after all, the wages of black labor paid the salaries of black professionals, provided the customers for Negro businessmen, and helped porters "pay their dues in their churches and lodges." White workers "cannot and will not organize [black workers]," Randolph asserted. "The history of the Jewish, Italian and Irish workers shows that various groups of workers must organize themselves. In the process of self-organization and self-struggle, Negro workers will develop the necessary labor view-point, sense of responsibility, a labor union morale and technique."[43]
In one demonstration of the convergence of former enemies in the mid-1920s, Du Bois heartily endorsed Randolph and the BSCP. Speaking of the porters, Du Bois said that "men of their intelligence and skill should long ago have organized." They had not unionized because "since the days of slavery the black laborer has been allied with the white capitalist. Since emancipation he has been bribed by philanthropy so that he thinks the thoughts of the rich, the powerful, the employing class. At the same time he has been kicked out of the major part of the white labor movement and his resultant resentment has helped his alignment with capital." Du Bois, however, proclaimed that the Afro-American worker was awakening and predicted that "the Pullman porters are going to have a union."[44]
Du Bois's endorsement of the BSCP unintentionally revealed his own ineradicable class bias, however--a bias that would forever hamper his efforts lead a radical mass movement among blacks. Simply put, Du Bois again confused himself with the masses of blacks. He praised the porters for performing "an unforgettable service" for "their own race. Without stirring racial animosities, with infinite tact and with sympathetic courtesy they have made it possible to travel with a minimum of insult and inconvenience. I have travelled 50,000 miles in every state of the union and without the ministrations of the Pullman Porters I should today be dead of exhaustion and shame."[45] Du Bois, however, ignored the palpable fact that very few Afro-Americans could afford Pullman berths. As was his habit, Du Bois generalized from his vastly atypical experience, and considered his own life as epitomizing that of the race.
Du Bois's class bias appeared in another of his pronouncements favoring the BSCP. He accurately catalogued the obstacles facing the BSCP: Pullman company purchase of the support or silence of black and white newspapers, U.S. government policies which favored corporations, and the racism of white labor unions. The Pullman Company formed a bogus, company union, and then forced the porters to accept that "union" or lose their jobs. But Du Bois responded by saying that "perhaps it is better to lose this job. Perhaps we have served as porters long enough. We were good slaves; but we outgrew the job. We were good cheap servants; we are outgrowing that job. We are good porters. But if being porters means being driven slaves and alms-taking servants, then God hasten the day when we outgrow that job." Du Bois's use of the word "we," however, elided a crucial distinction: the lives of the porters and their families depended upon their Pullman jobs. Du Bois, whose vastly higher salary was paid by the NAACP, rode in the Pullman cars, rather than working in them.[46]
Randolph more properly insisted that the BSCP's fight far transcended the interests of its immediate members and concerned the entire Negro race. In this belief, he continued his longstanding Socialist and racialist internationalism. "Our struggle is not for a week or a month or a year," he said, "but for all time. We are building for generations of black children unborn.... The landmarks of progress are the results of ceaseless, continuous and prolonged struggle."[47]
You have now passed the period of uncertainty. Men of vision and faith, women of hope and devotion, children yearning for a better world to live in, a world without race hatred and proscription, a world without ignorance and poverty, a world without slavery of body or mind, are patiently relying on you to bring them a little more sunshine, cheer, good-will and happiness, through your steadfast devotion to your movement.... This is a supreme test of your manhood. It is an acid test of the entire race. If you fail, the race fails; if you succeed, the race succeeds. Of course you will not fail, you cannot fail. Mistakes may delay your progress, wise counsel may hasten your progress, but one thing is certain, ultimate victory is assured. What you have done, white men have done. They succeeded, so can you.[48]
Linking the Brotherhood to worldwide and even cosmic events, Randolph proclaimed "The World of Color is stirring.... Tides of nationalism and racialism rise threateningly in the lands of ebon races to throw off their white capitalist oppressors." Revolt brewed within colored colonies and imperialist nations. This struggle for freedom "never ceases until all forms of freedom are won"--political, civic, and economic. The BSCP rose "to fulfill this cosmic condition as well as the particular needs of the Pullman porters and maids" and "marks an inevitable stage in the trend of race, social and labor progress."[49] Threatened with arrest and jail for articles attacking the Chicago Whip, Randolph declared that "Somebody must suffer for the progress of all great movements. It is the price of the advancement of humanity. We as a race must build up leaders who are willing to pay the price." The heirs of the noble abolitionists, such leaders must "re-dedicate our hearts and minds to the unfinished tasks of emancipation, so that Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and that vast throng of unknown and unsung heroes.... shall not have died in vain."[50] Randolph assured the porters that "all the millions of the Pullman Company could not cause me to desert you." The porters believed him; many asserted that the Pullman Company had literally given Randolph a blank check that he could make out for whatever sum he wanted if he would desert the union. Randolph, the story went, indignantly refused the bribe.[51]
Surveying the achievements of the Brotherhood after its first months, Randolph proclaimed that it heralded the arrival of "a New Negro" and "has awakened the black workers everywhere to a sense of their power, responsibility and rights."[52]
What have we done? We have built up the mightiest economic movement among Negroes in the world.... For the first time in the history of our race, we have formulated and presented to the public, a solid, sound, sane and sober program for the liberation of a large group of Negro workers in particular and the race in general.... The public respects you, organized labor admires you and the Company is concluding that you must be reckoned with.... Hundreds of millions, built upon your bent backs, coined out of your sweat and blood, have been thrown in the balance to beat you....[53]
The BSCP, Randolph continued, must become "indispensable to the Pullman industry." Its future was "tied up with the economic and social destiny of the race as a whole. Upon intelligent functioning of the Brotherhood will largely depend the future of the Negro worker in American industry.... Our high mission is to bring more sunlight into the life of men, more happiness to the world, to add to the sum total of human joy..... Long live the Brotherhood! The future belongs to the New Negro."[54] For Crosswaith the New Negro similarly represented far more than "the development of the Negro in the arts, and literature"; he heralded a new understanding of the social system under which he lived, and of the centrality of economic problems in race relations.[55]
Crosswaith praised the BSCP for inspiring white as well as black workers. "The Brotherhood's success has shattered many of the beliefs and left over ideas about the Negro worker and his capacity to function in the industrial realm; it has also given fresh courage to our friends who believe in the humanhood of the Negro race." BSCP success "sounds the advanced note of the arrival of the Negro worker into the ranks of organized labor," where it will tear down the divisive color bar and end capitalists' use of Negroes as scabs. "Already unorganized Negro workers in almost every industry are beginning to look with inquiring eyes to the Brotherhood for counsel and leadership in their endeavor to organize," Crosswaith claimed.[56]
Randolph's vision also transcended race. Recognizing "that the message of the Brotherhood and the cause of Negro labor must go beyond the boundaries of the colored world," Randolph sought "the ear and attention of the white public." He addressed universities, sororities, civic and social bodies, ministerial alliances, and labor bodies. "The Brotherhood has made the first systematic presentation of the cause of Negro wage earners to the white world, to white labor groups. Many of these white bodies had never heard of a Negro union or of Negroes who were interested in unionism. They had been led to believe that all Negroes were voluntary scabs." Similarly, at BSCP meetings blacks "saw what they had never seen before.... white labor leaders" exhorting black workers to victory.[57]
Randolph touted the BSCP's campaign against Pullman paternalism as heralding a new era for all workers. The BSCP's universal significance consisted in part in that it "has been the defiant spearhead against the movement of company unions in America," which organized labor had allowed to flourish without major opposition. "It was left to the Negro workers, expressed through the BSCP, to work out and execute a vigorous program on the company union movement." Black wage earners, "stigmatized as the classic scabs of America" would liberate "their white brothers from the despotism of company unionism." The Messenger published a devastating historical analysis of the origins of welfare capitalism in Rockefeller's Colorado Fuel and Iron company after the Ludlow Massacre.[58]
Randolph's fight for the BSCP, therefore, represented a fulfillment rather than a repudiation of his Socialist philosophy and hopes, adapted to the more hostile social climate of the 1920s. In line with his longstanding belief that revolution would result from immediate victories and rising expectations rather than from immiseration, Randolph fomented change in whatever venue he could. The BSCP embodied his beliefs in working-class interdependency, in unionism (interracial where possible, and exclusively black when necessary), and in black and working-class self-activity, as well as his fight against white capitalist hegemony over blacks and workers.
A brilliant orator and tireless organizer, Randolph achieved astounding success in enlisting not only Pullman porters, but a sizeable sector of the African-American community, in the cause of the porters and of unionism generally. Overcoming or transcending vehement opposition from traditionally anti-union churches, newspapers, politicians, and businessmen, Randolph pioneered a "community unionism" that energized porters' wives, society women, working-class blacks in other occupations, and, as the 1920s progressed, an increasing number of Afro-American leaders. As Spero and Harris said in The Black Worker (1931), the porter was "the only contact which thousands of white persons have with the race. His doings therefore assume an importance which extends beyond the confines of his own group and makes any organized movement on his part a matter of concern to the whole Negro population... It was well-nigh impossible for a Negro leader to remain neutral toward the union, and the position which he took toward it became a fundamental test."[59] Indeed, a black leader's stance towards the BSCP reflected his entire weltanschauung, his ultimate goals and his strategy for achieving them. Randolph made unionism a premier topic of discussion among Afro-Americans; and, by his eloquence, pleading, denunciations, and mass pressure, won many for his crusade.
Nevertheless, Randolph almost single-handedly destroyed the BSCP in 1928. He did this by trusting not in working-class or African-American power, but in the white supremacist power structure he had so long and so justly scorned. Disregarding the views of many knowledgeable union leaders and advisors, and trampling on the will of the rank and file, Randolph trusted that the United States government, the staunchly racist railroad brotherhoods, and the AFL would win for the BSCP power he did not believe porters could win for themselves. With all the good will in the world, Randolph committed a colossal blunder on the magnitude of Du Bois's "Close Ranks" fiasco. Randolph, like Du Bois, found that the white supremacist power structure matched his worst expectations rather than his fondest hopes. The resulting catastrophe largely discredited Randolph and the cause of Negro unionism, as well as destroying the Messenger.[60]
By 1926, Randolph's almost superhuman exertions had enlisted over half of the porters in the BSCP, despite their vulnerability to Pullman's intimidation and blandishments. However, the Pullman company, as most corporations, refused to recognize the union, much less negotiate with it. Instead of calling a strike, however, Randolph appealed to the Mediation Board established by the Railway Labor Act of 1926, thus entangling the porters for over eighteen months in obscure and secretive bureaucratic wrangling that left them dependent on a U.S. government agency which, predictably, betrayed them.[61]
The Railway Labor Act of 1926 was passed at the behest of the railroads and the "Big Four" railroad Brotherhoods, who represented skilled white railroad employees. (The Brotherhoods totally and explicitly excluded blacks). The Act established a Mediation Board charged with adjudicating disputes by voluntary mediation and, if that failed, voluntary arbitration. If neither of these methods worked, and a national emergency threatened (a major strike would cripple the nation's transportation system and undermine its economy), the Board could ask for an emergency Presidential Commission with powers to hear both sides and, in effect, impose a settlement. The railroads and the Brotherhoods maintained far different interpretations of the Act's main provisions and opposite hopes about its effects. The corporations assumed that the Act's machinery, culminating in a Commission appointed by the President, would avert strikes while containing the Brotherhoods; the workers, who had suffered massive U.S. repression in previous strikes, hoped that they could win concessions with federal support. However, everyone (except Randolph) realized that full government intervention would occur only under one condition: the credible threat of a strike that would tie up interstate commerce. Randolph trusted the Board because he wanted to work within the system--to show the "Big Four" and the AFL that a black union could play by white rules. This, he hoped, would win Brotherhood and AFL support for unionism among blacks. Indeed, Randolph had waited until the Railway Labor Act was passed, instead of asking for government intervention under a previous law, because the Brotherhoods approved of the new legislation.[62]
The Mediation Board agreed to hear the BSCP's case, and eventually certified the Brotherhood as the legitimate representative of the porters. However, the Pullman Company refused mediation and then arbitration. (Meanwhile, a separate BSCP appeal on different issues met rejection at the hands of the Interstate Commerce Commission). With scant other options, Randolph asked the exasperated BSCP members to authorize a strike, which they did by a whopping 6,053 to 17 vote. (Pullman employed about 11,000 men as porters and roughly 200 women as maids.) However, during the canvass for the strike vote, Randolph equivocated about whether he would actually call a strike if authorized. This both encouraged a "yes" vote by BSCP members (who were not necessarily risking an actual strike), and emboldened the Pullman Company and its government henchmen (who recognized that Randolph was bluffing). Some prominent BSCP leaders wanted a strike backed by militant action to keep scabs off the cars and otherwise disrupt Pullman operations. Some militants even envisioned recruiting women and children to sit on the tracks and block trains. Randolph, however, wanted not a strike but only the threat of a strike, which he hoped would evoke a Presidential Commission and, after the resultant publicity about the porters' grievances, a just settlement. He feared, with good reason, that a strike would result in the destruction of the BSCP and the loss of jobs for most of its members. As leader of the BSCP, therefore, he manipulated the porters and the union leadership to force an artificial confrontation that, he hoped, would result in Pullman concessions extracted by an anxious government. He was even received by President Coolidge, who expressed his heartfelt sympathy but claimed he could not issue a statement urging a settlement.[63]
The Pullman Company, confident that it could crush the BSCP, notified its on-call porters, hired scabs, mobilized its supporters in the black community, and made token concessions. It virtually imprisoned some porters in its cars, feeding them as it awaited a possible strike. Meanwhile, a representative of the Mediation Board travelled from the District of Columbia to Chicago and, in a secret and informal meeting, inquired about Pullman's wishes. He was told that the strike threat was illusory and that the Pullman Company opposed the convening of a Presidential Commission. The Board member supervising the case told his colleagues that "if anything approaching a real strike could have been staged with any hope of success, it would have been done long ago." The Board's chair exulted that this was "exactly the information we wanted to get." The Board then scuttled the idea of a President's Commission on the grounds that a strike of Pullman porters would not constitute an emergency: Pullman coaches were luxuries, not essential for the operation of the railroads. In fact, however, the Board knew that Randolph was bluffing--using the threat of a strike precisely to evoke an emergency Commission. They refused to ask Coolidge for an emergency Commission for the same reason that Randolph wanted one: by forcing some negotiation and concessions, a Commission would, under the existing circumstances, have implicitly favored the union. The Mediation Board would ask Coolidge for a Commission at the behest of a company, but not of a union--especially a Negro union.[64]
Randolph now confronted a self-induced dilemma: if he was only bluffing, many BSCP officers and members were not. Once their appeal had been rejected by the Board, the porters could only risk a strike (and their jobs) or abjectly surrender. Randolph surreptitiously contacted William Green, the racist head of the racist AFL, and asked that Green telegraph the BSCP "advising" a "postponement" of the strike until times were more propitious. (Neither Green nor Randolph explained, or could have explained, what this meant). Randolph used this last-minute telegram as an excuse to "postpone" (in reality cancel) the strike. According to Spero and Harris, "frantic efforts were made to make the strike fiasco appear to have been a well-considered and carefully planned procedure which added immeasurably to the strength and standing of the union.... Handbills in this vein flooded the Negro districts. The Negro papers were filled with such statements."[65]
In fact, Randolph's action--taken with scant consultation of the other leaders, and none whatsoever with the membership--almost destroyed the BSCP. The porters, demoralized after endless waiting, petitioning, organizing, and hoping, quit the union in droves. The Pullman Company fired or suspended those it suspected of voting to authorize the strike. Amidst the ruins many blacks, and not only porters, castigated Randolph as a temporizer, a secretive autocrat, a fraud, a traitor, a self-aggrandizing publicity hound, and even a crook in the tradition of Marcus Garvey. The Messenger, already struggling, ingloriously and immediately ended its 11-year history. Leaders who had warned Randolph that the Railway Labor Act was suitable only for powerful unions that could, in the absence of an imposed settlement, disrupt the railroads, felt vindicated. Precisely because Randolph had extolled the union as a shining hope for African Americans generally, and indeed of a new era of militant activism and inter-racial cooperation, the collapse of the BSCP discredited not only Randolph and the BSCP, but the larger visions with which Randolph had associated it. The AFL, which viewed blacks in general and Randolph in particular with disdain and suspicion, rejected the BSCP's application for a regular charter, and instead enrolled individual locals under the Jim-Crow mechanism traditionally used to segregate, marginalize, and destroy Afro-American unions. The "Big Four" Brotherhoods predictably offered no support of any kind, and, as always, viciously excluded blacks.[66]
Like Du Bois, Randolph had trusted mainstream institutions, and like Du Bois he (predictably) suffered betrayal. Perhaps the illusion of access to power, and the longing for a chimerical "inclusion" in institutions that designedly excluded and humiliated blacks, partly motivated both men. Certainly both Du Bois and Randolph attacked their black opponents with a vituperation seldom heaped upon high-ranking whites. However, both men could argue that they had little real choice: the governments, corporations, and unions arrayed against Afro-America were totally unscrupulous, and routinely destroyed the lives of people of any race or sex who indulged in mass action. Du Bois, Randolph, and other African Americas faced an intractable dilemma that constitutes, in its way, the essence of American history. Excluded groups, who now as always comprise the majority of Americans, can exercise power within the system only by massing power outside of it. Mainstream institutions serve the few who own them, and will compromise with outsiders only when those outsiders credibly threaten massive disruption. Only by building alternative institutions outside of existing structures--countercultural organizations fully owned by the wronged and oppressed--can the "victims of democracy" make their voices heard. However, mainstream institutions respond to such threats with terrorism. The BSCP won (a temporary) victory (during the Great Depression), only after massive social upheavals had evoked new labor laws and indeed new unions.
Although Spero and Harris, writing three years after BSCP's debacle, offered no realistic alternative strategy (they adamantly insisted that a strike would have been crushed), their conclusions paralleled those of other contemporary observers:
The great pity of the virtual collapse of the porter's union lies not merely in its effect upon the porters who have grievances which sorely need correction but in its effect upon Negro labor generally. The hope that this movement would become the center and rallying point of Negro labor as a whole is now dead. Of course a substantial nucleus of the Brotherhood still remains intact, and it may be that in another crisis it will again grow into an important movement. The chances are, however, that it will be a long time before Randolph or any other leader of this group will again be presented with opportunities as favorable as those which were missed.[67]
Simultaneously with the BSCP's organizing campaign, however, Afro-American intellectuals discovered yet another arena where they could fight for social justice--the realm of creative literature. The career of Claude McKay, a precursor of the Harlem Renaissance, epitomized the pitfalls in this endeavor.
Notes:
[1] "The American Federation of Labor," TM, October 1923.
[2] "Labor Day," TM, September 1923.
[3] APR, "Industrial Unionism," TM, May-June 1928; A.W. Johnson, "The Coal Miners At Bay," TM May-June 1928. Johnson was one of the highest Afro-American officials in the UWM.
[4] "The American Civil Liberties Union," TM, December 1921; "The United Front," TM, May 1922; "The Negro Democrat," TM, September 1924; CO, "How the Negro Should Vote in this Campaign," TM, September 1924.
[5] CO, "How the Negro Should Vote in this Campaign," TM, September 1924; "Chas. H. Roberts," TM, October 1924.
[6] APR, "The Political Situation and the Negro," TM, October 1924.
[7] ibid.
[8] ibid.
[9] APR, "The Election in Retrospect," TM, December 1924.
[10] "The Menace of the Negro Communists," TM, August 1923; GSS, "The Socialist Party and the Negro," August 1923; "The Sanhedrin," TM, October 1923.
[11] Editorial, "Send Owen to Congress," TM, February 1928; Editorial, "Negro Congressmen, TM, March 1928; Editorial, "The National Skeleton, TM May-June 1928.
[12] James Ivy, "Book Bits," of Maynard Shipley's The War on Modern Science, TM, February, 1928.
[13] Editorial, "The Presidential Race," TM, March 1928; Editorial, "The Candidates," TM, May--June 1928.
[14] Ivy, "Book Bits," review of Upton Sinclair's Money Writes, TM, March 1928.
[15] James Ivy, "Book Bits," review of Charles Morrison's The Outlawry of War, TM, February 1928.
[16] James Ivy, "Book Bits," review of Warren Brokaw's Society and How to Create It, TM, February 1928. Note Ivy's exquisite use of "plain" for "plane."
[17] James Ivy, "Book Bits," review of Max Eastman's Marx and Lenin, TM, May-June 1928.
[18] James Ivy, "Book Bits," review of William Z. Foster's Misleaders of Labor, TM, April 1928.
[19] James Ivy, "Book Bits," review of Prosperity? edited by Harry Laidler and Norman Thomas, TM, April 1928. The phrase "shoals [or reefs] of roast beef and apple pie" is a famous quotation from German sociologist Werner Sombart, whose 1906 book, Why is There No Socialism in the United States? was perhaps the first sustained attempt to answer that perennial question.
[20] Editorials, TM, November 1920; "The Negro and the New Social Order," TM, March 1919; "National Brotherhood Workers Convention," TM, December 1919; "Immigration and Japan," TM, August 1924. Randolph opposed banning "any group because of race of color"; a total ban would affect all races equally.
[21] "The Woman's Party and the Negro," TM, September 1924.
[22] In a sad commentary on black capitalism, the Negro Business number, originally scheduled for October, was postponed because many businesses, despite Randolph's entreaties, did not submit their material on time.
[23] "A Garvey Myth," TM, November 1923; "Business and Labor," TM November 1923.
[24] Abner, "Fraternal Insurance," TM, November 1923; Perry, "Life Insurance in Our Racial Development," TM, November 1923; "Negro Youth Movement," TM, March 1924.
[25] Thomas L. Dabney, "Can Negro Business Survive," TM, April 1928.
[26] ibid.
[27] Editorial, "Consumers' Cooperation," TM, May-June 1928.
[28] TL, "Theatre," TM, December 1923.
[29] "Exalting Negro Womanhood," TM, January 1924.
[30] "A Bit of History," TM December 1925; APR, "The Truth About the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters," TM February 1926; Frank Crosswaith, "Toward the Home Stretch," TM July 1926; APR, "The Case of the Pullman Porters," TM July 1925; APR, "Pullman Porters Need Their Own Union," TM August 1925; William H. Harris, Keeping the Faith: A. Philip Randolph, Milton Webster, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 1925-1937 (Urbana, 1991), 1-65. For a full account of Crosswaith's career see John H. Seabrook's unpublished dissertation, "Black and White Unite: The Career of Frank R. Crosswaith" (Rutgers, 1980).
[31] A Sagittarius, "A Dip into Speculative Philosophy," TM, April 1925; APR, "An Open Letter to EF Carry," TM, January 1926; APR, "Pullman Porters Need Their Own Union," TM, August 1925; APR, "The Pullman Company and the Pullman Porters," TM, September 1925.
[32] APR, "A Reply to Pullman Propaganda," TM, October 1926.
[33] "The Wage Conference," TM, February 1926; APR, "The Case of the Pullman Porter," TM, July 1925; ARP, "Randolph's Reply to Howard Perry," TM, October-November 1925; APR, "Pullman Porters Need Their Own Union," TM, August 1925.
[34] APR, "A. Philip Randolph Answers New Questions for Perry Howard," TM, December 1925; APR, "The New Pullman Porter," TM, April 1926; "Wage Conference," TM, February 1926; APR, "Open Letter to the Pullman Company," TM, July 1927; APR, "An Open Letter to Mr. E.F. Carry, TM, January 1926; APR, "To the Organizing Committee," TM, August 1926; APR, "The State of the Brotherhood," TM, June 1926; APR, "Pullman Porters Need Their Own Union," TM, August 1925; APR, "The Case of the Pullman Porter," TM, July 1925.
[35] APR, "An Open Letter to E.F. Carry," TM, January 1926; APR, "A Letter to Delegates to Pullman Company's Wage Conference," TM, February 1926; APR, "What the Joining Fees are Used For," TM, April 1926.
[36] A Saggitarius, "The Leap of Marcus Curtius," TM, February 1927; APR, "To the Brotherhood Men," TM, March 1926; "The Slacker-Porter," TM, June 1926; A.L. Totten, "Pullman Soothing Salve," TM, January 1926.
[37] APR, "Our Next Step," TM, July 1926.
[38] APR, "The Pullman Company and the Pullman Porter," TM, September 1925.
[39] "Randolph's Reply to Perry Howard," TM,, October-November 1925. Commenting on Pullman threats to replace blacks with Filipinos, Randolph stated: "Nor do I say this in condemnation of the Filipinos. They have a right to work anywhere they can get a job. It is simply a question of the fact that the Pullman Company will use Filipinos to discourage Pullman porters from organizing just as it will use Negroes to keep white employees from organizing. It is not that the Company loves the Filipinos more, but that it loves a real union less." APR, "The Employee Representation Plan," TM, January 1927. Randolph was correct; although the Pullman Company experimented with Mexican and Chinese porters (on runs to Mexico and the West Coast, respectively), it soon returned to its practice of hiring only African Americans as porters.
[40] APR, "Randolph's Reply to Perry Howard," TM, October-November 1925.
[41] "A Philip Randolph Answers New Questions to Perry Howard," TM, December 1925; "Wage Conference," TM,, February 1926; APR, "An Open Letter to Frank O. Lowden," TM,, August 1926.
[42] APR, "To the Organizing Committee," TM, August 1926; APR, "The State of the Brotherhood," TM, June 1926; APR, "Pullman Porters Need Their Own Union," TM, August 1925; APR, "The Case of the Pullman Porter," TM, July 1925.
[43] APR, "The State of the Brotherhood," TM, February 1927; "Editorials," TM, August 1927; APR, "To the Organizing Committee," TM, May 1926.
[44] DB Editorial, "The Black Man and Labor," TC, December 1925. This was the same editorial which guardedly endorsed the American Negro Labor Congress.
[45] DB, "Again Pullman Porters," TC, April 1926.
[46] DB Editorial, "The Black Man and Labor," TC, December 1925; DB, "Again, Pullman Porters," TC, April 1926. Du Bois attacked the U.S. government's policy in "Pullman Porters," TC, January 1926. Randolph, of course, did not risk his job by his union activity; the porters asked Randolph to represent him partly because he was not employed by the Pullman Company, and was therefore immune from direct Company pressure and retaliation.
[47] APR, "Our Next Step," TM, July 1926.
[48] APR, "Notes of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters," TM, January 1926.
[49] APR, "The State of the Brotherhood," TM, February 1927.
[50] APR, "The Indictment," TM, April 1926.
[51] APR, "The Pullman Company and the Pullman Porters," TM, September 1925; Jack Santino, Miles of Smiles: Stories of Black Pullman Porters (Urbana, 1989), 61-67.
[52] APR, "To the Brotherhood," TM, March 1926.
[53] ibid.
[54] ibid.
[55] Crosswaith, "Crusading for the Brotherhood," TM, June 1926.
[56] Crosswaith, "Toward the Home Stretch," TM, July 1926.
[57] APR, "The State of the Brotherhood," TM, February 1927; APR, "Notes of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters," TM, January 1926.
[58] APR, "The IRT and the American Federation of Labor," TM, December 1927; Benjamin Chase, "Binding the Worker to His Job," TM, July 1926. For a more recent, yet similar analysis of company unionism and the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company plan, see David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor (Cambridge: New York, 1989), 343-350, 411-464.
[59] Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 430.
[60] Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 430-460; Anderson, Randolph, 187-215, Harris, Keeping the Faith, 84-116.
[61] ibid.
[62] ibid.
[63] ibid.
[64] ibid.
[65] ibid. The Spero and Harris quote is on page 458.
[66] ibid.
[67] Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 460.
By the time the Messenger expired in 1928, all of Randolph's cherished dreams lay in ruins. The idea of inter-racial or even industrial unionism had foundered on implacable AFL racism and craft exclusiveness; third-party political action was no longer seriously considered, while the two capitalist parties held out no hope for the Negro; expectations for Negro business lay shattered; and even Randolph's cause of the moment, the all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, lay in tatters.
Even as Du Bois moved relentlessly left, and Harrison increasingly emphasized racial consciousness, Randolph, while remaining in his heart a Socialist, resigned from the SP and turned the Messenger first into a general interest Afro-American magazine and then into the organ of the fledgling Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), an all-black union that Randolph hoped could affiliate with the AFL. Randolph enlisted arguments from his Socialist philosophy in the cause of a more specific crusade, but one in which he perceived a universal significance reminiscent of his Socialist hopes.
Afro-American radicals had achieved far more success by the mid-1920s in persecuting Garvey than in improving the racial or working-class environment in the United States. The split in the white radical movement caused by the war, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Red Scare was replicated within the thin ranks of African-American radicals, and exacerbated by the UNIA's debacle. Although Garvey's organization remained the largest mass black organization in the United States, the collapse of the Black Star Line and the Negro Factories Corporation, followed by the jailing and deportation of Garvey, crippled the UNIA and caused devastating infighting. Briggs, Fort-Whiteman, and Moore repudiated both the UNIA and the Socialists and affiliated with the Communist party. As the Messenger early perceived, this strategy proved a dead end. Although such acrimony among the African-American radical intelligentsia undoubtedly vitiated its impact, the masses of blacks ignored them all with impartial disdain.
By the mid-1920s, the ruling class had destroyed all potential nuclei of radical, countercultural interracialism. The IWW, the most strident and consistent interracial organization in the United States, suffered from more official and officially sanctioned terrorism and violence than any other organization, including the SP, the NAACP, the UNIA, or the FNF. By October 1923, with the IWW virtually destroyed and the progressive garment unions suffering a massive hemorrhage of members (which also afflicted the AFL), Randolph was heralding the AFL as "the real American Labor Movement.... It is unfortunate that it does not embrace all of the organized labor groups in this country, but such is impossible at the moment."[1]
Gompers addressed the black workers of America in the September 1923 Messenger. Although the AFL chief implicitly faulted blacks for not joining unions and acknowledged that the AFL accepted black members mainly to save white unions, Randolph enthusiastically greeted the unprecedented "message of hope, good-will and cooperation [sent] to the Negro workers through the only Negro labor organ in America--the Messenger.... A change in attitude on the Negro workers is destined to take place in the American labor movement. It is inevitable. Enlightened self-interest will dictate it." Randolph hoped that the messages of Gompers and of John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, would dissolve "the prejudices in the minds of the Negro workers against their white brothers."[2] Randolph placed his hopes on the AFL only after the destruction or vitiation of all radical alternatives. The subsequent history of the AFL and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters illustrated the desperate and chimerical nature of this hope. The AFL never offered a modicum of racial justice until the mass upsurge of workers during the Great Depression, the Wagner Act, and the CIO virtually compelled such action. In the Messenger's last issue, Randolph reiterated his futile calls for an industrial unionism that could effectively protect workers by organizing upon the same lines as modern industry. However, that same May-June number carried a horrifying account of how the capitalists were presently mauling the United Mine Workers, the AFL's largest industrial (and therefore inter-racial) union.[3]
The destruction of the Socialist party left Randolph politically as well as industrially bereft. In late 1921 the Messenger highlighted a report by the American Civil Liberties Union which stated that "Never before in American history were the forces of reaction so completely in control of our political and economic life.... There is nowhere in the country any effective political or industrial organization of the forces of resistance to reaction except in a few scattered localities and a few exceptional industries." Six months later the Messenger lamented that "the Socialists, Communists (of many varieties), the Socialist Labor Party, the Farmer-Labor Party and the Workers' Party, all various efforts of the wide working masses, are weakened and demoralized, powerless to beat off the savage attacks of capitalism." Before the 1924 elections the Messenger noticed a growing rapprochement between the party of white supremacy and African Americans in the North. "The Negro Democrat is arriving," it said, because Ku Klux Klan persecution had united blacks, Jews, and Catholics. Reflecting on the rise of liberal Democrats in the North, Owen claimed that "the Democratic party of New York has given more to the Negro there in the last eight years than the Republicans have given since Emancipation."[4] Although the northern Democratic party at the state and local level did aid blacks, Owen ignored the fact that voting Democratic in federal elections further strengthened the hand of the virulently racist Southern Bourbons who controlled the national party.
Although the Messenger backed New York SP candidates in 1924 (including Norman Thomas for governor, and black Socialist Frank Crosswaith for Secretary of State), it was despondent about the lack of real choice offered workers and African Americans. No party except the Socialists condemned the KKK, but the SP did not field its own presidential candidate. Owen claimed that the Democrats had somewhat improved while the Republicans had degenerated, so the two capitalist parties were about equally worthwhile (or worthless); but "third party advocates" confronted "an unanswerable argument" in the contention that a vote for a third party merely helped the worst of the two capitalist parties.
Commenting on the Farmer-Labor party headed by La Follette (whose personal record on racial issues was good), Owen injected some empirical good sense into his analysis, exclaiming that "it is not sufficient to say that because most Negroes are farmers and laborers that the party representing primarily farmers and working people is ipso facto the representative of the Negro." Owen noted that although some racially progressive forces backed the Progressive party, its most important union backers, such as the Machinists, the railroad brotherhoods, and the AFL, were racist and/or exclusionary. Moreover, the Progressive party "straddled" on the KKK; even the SP denounced it primarily because of "the overwhelmingly Jewish composition of the party." In Indiana, Owen claimed, almost all former SP members had joined the Klan. He concluded that as "there is little choice between the three" contestants, blacks must vote against whichever party the KKK locally controlled. Moreover, blacks should demonstrate political independence by voting for La Follette or Davis (the Democratic candidate) because their blind Republican allegiance had rendered them voiceless. Another Messenger article, however, advocated a vote for black New York Republican Charles Roberts, despite his mediocrity and intense conservatism, because blacks "must think in terms of both race and class in these times of political confusion. Some kind of Negro in Congress is better than no Negro there although we don't expect anything from him, which is just what we are getting from the whites."[5]
Citing the opportunism and equivocation of all parties on the Klan, Randolph lamented that "the Negro is a man without a party." The KKK had infected all parties in different sections of the country, so condemning it would lose more votes than it would win. Noticing the unprincipled scramble of even radical parties for votes, and remarking on the Labour party's dismal performance in England, Randolph said that "once in office or power, radical, liberal or conservative must carry on largely in the same old way.... Is it good or bad? That is not the question. The fact is it is."[6] In the United States, the Progressive party would advocate justice for the Negro no more than the other mainstream parties. Yet any third party increased competition for the votes of Negroes, which "enables the Negro to bargain effectively." The chief value of a third party "does not lie so much in the character of the party as it does in its mere existence. Of course, its value to the Negro or any other group, increases when it is liberal, since it forces the other two parties to become more liberal too." It was more important that the Negro recognize the class basis of politics "than that he should vote for any particular party. As a general proposition, it is a sound policy for the Negro to split his votes. All Negroes should no more vote alike than all white people should vote alike."[7] Although "the platforms of the three parties are not radically different in economic philosophy," a large La Follette vote would frighten the other parties into making concessions. The Messenger said that "the most striking evidence of the intellectual and political emancipation of the Negro will be the extent to which they bolt the Republican party in this election and vote for La Follette."[8]
After the election, Randolph disgustedly noted that the Klan, which "represents the basic American spirit--the spirit of bigotry and intolerance, the spirit to persecute and oppress the Negro, the Catholic, the Jew, the foreigner"--emerged the big winner. La Follette, despite his own sterling racial record, temporized on the Klan, refused to address a single black audience, and endorsed conservative Republican and Democratic candidates who detested him while ignoring the Socialists who supported him. "There is nothing in the vote which Senator La Follette received to justify the tactics he employed," Randolph said. Indiana Negroes voted overwhelmingly for Coolidge and probably for the pro-Klan Republican gubernatorial candidate as well. A rise in the price of wheat spelled ruin for La Follette because "farmers are only radical when the price of their product is low. They are more conservative than a Rotarian when their economic conditions improve." The SP was "too weak to count for much." Most depressingly, the outcome proved "that labor leaders cannot deliver the labor vote, that politicians have little to hope for or fear from the promises or threats of labor leaders. It demonstrates the weakness of organized labor in American politics."[9] Randolph lamented that the trend toward reaction was worldwide, infecting even the Soviet Union.
The Messenger perceived that the Communists offered no realistic alternative. Hoping for a unified Left, Randolph almost completely ignored the massive splits within the SP until CP antics rendered commentary imperative. Immediately after the jailing of Garvey, the Messenger attacked black Communists as disruptionists and "a menace to the workers, themselves and the race.... So utterly senseless, unsound, unscientific and dangerous and ridiculous are their policies and tactics that we are driven to conclude that they are either lunatics or agents provocateurs, stool pigeons, of the United States Department of Justice." The Communists were "industrially trying to wreck the American Trade Union Movement." Black Communists aimed "to wreck all constructive, progressive, non-Communist programs" on the grounds that they were petty bourgeois. George Schuyler, a major new Messenger writer, said that the CP, "in obedience to the bulls from Moscow," attacked SP influence among blacks. The Messenger ridiculed Briggs and his African Blood Brotherhood, speculating that "perhaps the ABB, in obedience to the edict of Moscow, is planning to hold a World Negro Conference with its six members."[10]
By the 1928 election both the Socialists and the Communists had so far disappeared that they evoked scant mention. (Randolph did boost the candidacy of Chandler Owen, running for major-party nomination for a Chicago-area Congressional seat, to no avail.) Meanwhile, bigotry and religious fundamentalism ran wild. Racism, once mainly in the South, "has now spread the length and breath of the country," Randolph cried. "Discrimination because of color is everywhere, so is segregation and industrial jim crowism. It is as hard to find an area free of race prejudice in America as it is to find a Klansman in the Vatican. Whereas the protagonists of racial integrity and white supremacy formerly carried on their propaganda with a certain apologetic attitude, they are now blatantly militant."[11] James Ivy noted that America was riven by a conflict between two cultures. "The Ku Klux Klan, the Fundamentalists, and the Nordicists" aimed at "a new dark age"; their fight against the teaching of Evolution was only the opening salvo in a campaign against Modernism, liberalism, and "enlightenment, as represented by science."[12]
Randolph, therefore, early recognized that the election would focus on cultural rather than economic issues. However, it would ignore race and instead pit Protestant against Catholic. So-called intelligent voters would, "with the utmost seriousness and sincerity, speak blandly and innocently of the Pope running the United States" should Al Smith be elected. Towards the end of the Messenger's last issue, Randolph lamented that neither party would help the Negro and, with a bit of sarcasm, endorsed Al Smith. "The Klan controls Alabama, which is Democratic, and it also controls Indiana, which is Republican.... Since it is immaterial to the Negro workers which party gets into office, it would be striking a severe blow at intolerance, prejudice and bigotry if Negroes should help send this Catholic gentleman to the White House.... The Messenger believes that a Catholic President and a mixed cabinet of Jews, Atheists, Negroes, and Indians, would be an excellent thing for the soul of America." With this sardonic comment, the Messenger fell silent.[13]
Socialism appeared in the 1928 Messenger only in James Ivy's witty and incisive book reviews, and then only as an idea which, however worthy of respect, was fundamentally flawed. While clearly favoring Socialism, Ivy denied that it would inaugurate utopia. Reviewing a book by Upton Sinclair, Ivy denied that workers were inherently egalitarian or just. Rather than being the angels that Sinclair and other Socialists imagined, white workers were "no whit better than their capitalist overlords who take so much delight in booting them in their rears." White workers oppressed blacks as horribly as the capitalists exploited proletarians. "The white worker possesses no peculiar virtue not possessed by his capitalist overlord; every darky knows this if Mr. Sinclair doesn't. And why Mr. Sinclair should shed tears over the mass of white boobs is beyond me. What he says about their exploitation is true, and has been true throughout recorded history. A horse may throw its rider, but there is always another to vault into the saddle."[14] Although Ivy criticized another author's hopes in a world federation on the grounds that it ignored the real divisions of race, class, nationality, and religion that divided people, he also claimed that war, like exploitation, was inevitable:
Man rather likes war. He glories in it. To him it is a sort of semi-hallowed lark; the supreme producer of thrills and heroes. People, of course, grow tired of a particular war, just as one grows tired of beefsteak or pork chops after eating them over a long period. But one would not say on this account that one did not like beefsteak or pork chops. To do so would be silly; yet because after three or four years of a war people grow tired of war, gabble about... the utopia of universal peace, mushy idealists fondly imagine that man has actually grown tired of war; that he is through with it for all times.[15]
Ivy likewise ridiculed the notion that society's ills could be "as easily solved as a problem in plain geometry" by a more equitable distribution of wealth. Socialists claimed that the lust for wealth constituted the chief motive of every person; Ivy, on the contrary, insisted that even in those in whom it predominated it was "mixed with other and almost equally powerful desires." When economic needs were met (or even before) competition would emerge in other areas of life. "When man's dominant desire was military glory, we had evil; when it was religion we had evil; when it was rank as a statesman we had evil; now that it is wealth we have evil; and if on tomorrow it is social service, we will continue to have evil."[16]
Ivy attacked Socialist economic-determinist orthodoxy in other ways. He praised Marx and Lenin, by renegade Marxist Max Eastman, as "a brilliant and penetrating criticism of the Marxian orthodoxy.... Mr. Eastman would put revolutionary theory on a psychological basis instead of a metaphysical one. He puts Freud in the place of Hegel." Eastman applied the methods of higher criticism, previously reserved for other sacred texts, to the Marxist cannon, and demonstrated the contradictions between Marxist theory and Leninist practice. Eastman "attempt[s] to make social revolution scientific" and "divert it of its present religious togs."[17]
Ivy also decried the identification with and worship of wealth and power that characterized workers of both races. Americans, he said, basked in their presumed status as citizens of the world's richest nation; yet the nation's wealth was shared by very few. The richest 1% of the population owned 33% of the wealth and received 20% of the national income; the poorest 25% of the people received only 3.5% of that income. The workman, Ivy said, must recognize
his actual position in a capitalist society. Just as long as he continues to believe that on some not too distant tomorrow he too may be a Ford or a Rockefeller, just so long will he lack class consciousness, and just so long will he prevent the creation of a real working-class labor movement. It is the enormous wealth of America that lures our working class into a sodden sleep of fancied equality with the plutocrats. American laborers remind one of some Negro chauffeurs whom I have heard refer to their masters' Rolls as "our Rolls". "We have a Rolls Royce, and a Packard too you know." "We produce so much of this and so much of that; and we have more money than anybody else in the world, says the American laborer.[18]
Although Ivy did concede that "creature comforts here are not so hard to obtain," his analysis focused not so much on Sombart's "shoals of roast beef and apple pie" as on working-class hopes and illusions, and their sense of identity with both their masters and their masters' country.[19]
In the face of the destruction of the Left and the consequent lack of realistic options, the Messenger markedly changed its character by late 1923. It dropped its self-identification as a radical and scientific publication for both races and instead proclaimed itself "The World's Greatest Negro Monthly" and the "New Opinion of the New Negro." Previously, the Messenger had championed free immigration, despite its recognition that it lowered wages and that the wartime restrictions on immigration had facilitated the Great Migration of blacks northward--a trend Randolph greatly favored. In 1920 Randolph had proclaimed "Of course, the Messenger welcomes all peoples to the shores of America.... Immigration is not a menace to the workers' standard of living, unless labor fails to organize the immigrants. Every worker, black and white, has a right to go anywhere he pleases." Randolph repeatedly praised the cultural and political contributions of immigrants (more radical than native-born whites) and reminded his readers that blacks were most oppressed in those sections with the fewest immigrants, and best treated in areas where newcomers were concentrated. By 1924, however, the IWW--the union which most aggressively organized immigrants--was a shambles, and individual and group selfishness reigned supreme in society at large. In August of that year, therefore, the Messenger advocated totally banning immigration, which "overfloods the labor market, resulting in lowering the standard of living, race riots, and general social degradation." Ignoring his previous internationalism and the interests of the immigrants themselves, Randolph patriotically and parochially claimed that "excessive immigration is against the interests of all races and nationalities in the country--both foreign and native."[20] (Ironically, the racism of Alice Paul, head of the National Woman's party, motivated by a similarly myopic selfishness, estranged Randolph from a major expression of 1920s feminism.)[21]
Even before the 1924 elections, the November 1923 Messenger had marked a conservative new departure. This "Negro Business Achievement Number" was filled with articles (some written by notorious black reactionaries such as Moton and Scott, whom the Messenger had previously excoriated), praising black entrepreneurs.[22] Randolph asserted that the success of many race businesses belied Garvey's claim that only the UNIA had launched significant black commercial enterprises; the Business Achievement number would therefore dissolve "the least particle of belief in the Garvey myth." Yet Randolph also appropriated part of Garvey's message of racial pride, saying that "millions of dollars invested in legitimate businesses by Negroes have been a veritable inspiration to the Negro masses." Abruptly reversing its previous stance, the Messenger proclaimed that "superficial radicals frequently say that there is nothing in common between the employer and employee. To deny such a statement is heresy; to refute it by a well reasoned argument is sacrilege." It now claimed that Afro-American capitalist enterprises employed blacks in responsible positions and recycled their profits within the black community. Black capitalists, unlike white ones, mingled with their black customers in segregated neighborhoods and community institutions.[23]
The "Negro Business Achievement" number touted black business (including cooperatives) as a salvation for the race. A black insurance executive asserted that "the present trend of society is away from capitalism and toward cooperation [and] the development of people's institutions, where the sway of the capitalist and the influence of monied men does not dominate. Within the ranks of the Fraternal Insurance society, the Negro is to learn that he can organize and operate financial enterprises on the cooperative plan." Through Afro-American coops, blacks kept their money within the community and "tapped the power of the dominant race at its very roots." Another insurance executive appropriated the language of racial uplift in support of "the gospel of Life Insurance." Expressing the spirit of the 1920s, he proclaimed that economic development was as vital as religious, social, and educational progress in uplifting any race. Black life insurance companies "are bringing together the small sums which would otherwise be wasted or misapplied.... These millions are systematically and scientifically reinvested in the race and will ultimately command the respect and admiration of the other races of the world.... In this age of financial progress when men are measured by their wealth as well as their character, it stands to reason that races will be measured likewise." Black insurance companies (and banks) also lent to blacks and thus constituted "a reservoir of power.... the backbone of the structure upon which we, as a race, must rise." Life insurance agents, he said, "have consecrated their lives to the great mission." (The Messenger later added that "the growing army of Negro brain workers... have no hope of even a starvation wage without a corresponding growth of Negro business.") Randolph also criticized poor service, high prices, and exploitative practices in Afro-American businesses, however, and recommended that their black employees organize into unions.[24] In a significant indication of the changing nature of his support, in January 1924 Randolph thanked black businessmen for their support before praising white labor unions. The Messenger later added a column, "Negro Business," by George S. Schuyler.
By the time of the Messenger's demise, however, Randolph had in effect repudiated his emphasis on Negro business. Indeed, he may have emphasized the group economy in the previous few years only as a foil to Garvey. In a long article in the penultimate issue of the Messenger, Thomas L. Dabney pointed out that race-owned and race-oriented businesses could neither employ black workers nor provide jobs for educated African Americans. Black entrepreneurs could not replicate the days of early industrialization when unlimited access to free land, relatively wide opportunity and open competition, and, most crucially, government support had fostered the rise of the modern corporation. By the 1920s, trusts, oligopolies, and chain stores relentlessly crushed small businesses, and made starting a company on a shoestring impossible. The small niches in which black enterprises could flourish "are so few and of so little social value that the Negro cannot hope to achieve the desired goal in such business lines. Barber shops, hair dressing parlors, peanut stands, boot black stands, restaurants, millinery shops, bakeries, laundries, cigar stands, newsstands, boarding houses and other small businesses in which Negroes are engaged, offer little relief from unemployment for the Negro masses. Neither do they begin to offer clerical positions for our high school and college graduates."[25]
Nor, Dabney continued, would race businesses prosper on the basis of group pride or solidarity. "Negroes like other people are influenced more by prices and convenience than by race in the matter of buying. This practice is dictated by every consideration of economics and finance. Hence the appeals to race pride, while strong and feelingful, give way sooner or later to financial and economic conditions of the consumer, no matter who he may be."[26]
In his valedictory editorials--the same ones in which he despaired of political action, decried the lack of meaningful unions, and lamented the rising tide of racism--Randolph issued his parting words on the group economy. He agreed with Dabney that Negro enterprise was doomed not because of its color but because "Negro business is small business, and the day of small business is doomed." Even if petite black capitalists somehow combined into viable large enterprises, they would only exploit workers just as other capitalists did. White workers were mostly paid "starvation wages" and were "thrown on the scrap heap at earlier and earlier ages." Randolph proclaimed that "the Messenger has been very fair to Negro business... It has carried a score of articles on every phase of Negro business from farming to manufacture" because it realized from its founding in 1917 that "all other phases of the so-called race problem" depend upon "the economic life of the race." However, in a return to his earlier view, Randolph now insisted that only the consumer cooperative could improve the welfare of the mass of blacks. "It is," he said, " a democratic method and has the added value of benefitting all of the Negroes rather than a few."[27] However, Randolph admitted that cooperatives were virtually absent in the black community.
In December 1923 the Messenger, reflecting the Harlem Renaissance's displacement of political insurgency onto literary experimentation, announced it was "beginning to specialize in the theatrical field" because, as its dramatic critic Theophilus Lewis announced, good criticism was essential for great art.[28] In 1924 the Messenger, emulating the Crisis and the defunct Crusader, graced its covers with pictures of attractive African-American women. In the mainstream white press, it proclaimed, "the buffoon, the clown, the criminal Negro will be seen, but seldom the Negro of achievement, culture, refinement, beauty, genius and talent." The Messenger would show "in pictures as well as writing, Negro women who are unique, accomplished, beautiful, intelligent, industrious, talented, successful. We are going to take them by states, displaying two or three pages of these women artistically arranged each month."[29] In an age where class-based popular insurgencies were dead and the flapper represented women's liberation, the Messenger sought a wider popularity.
By the mid-1920s, therefore, Afro-American insurgencies had suffered the same fate as the larger, multiracial Left. Garvey was in jail and his organization fractured; the ABB and the Crusader were defunct; Hubert Harrison lacked an influential organizational base or stable organ; the Challenge and the Veteran had long since folded; and the circulation even of the NAACP's Crisis had plummeted. Randolph's Messenger and his Friends of Negro Freedom were also experiencing hard times. Randolph responded by turning the Messenger into more of a general interest magazine, featuring a regular sports column that focused on events of particular interest to blacks, a Negro business column, and satire, cartoons, and literature of general race interest. Nonetheless, like other homeless leftists, Randolph searched for a more focused, single-issue reform where he could advance his ideas on a more concrete level. He found it in the cause of the much-abused Pullman porters, an all-Negro workforce.
In 1925, frustrated officials of Pullman's company union, the Pullman Porters Benevolent Association (PPBA), recognized that the Pullman Company would unstintingly deceive and exploit porters unless stopped by organized power. One of these porters invited Randolph to an exploratory meeting on June 25, 1925, where Randolph and three veteran porters decided to form an independent union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP). The Messenger featured two long articles detailing porter grievances in its July and August issues, which, Randolph claimed, "aroused porters throughout the country." Randolph then addressed the Pullman Porters' Athletic Association on August 25, denouncing the Pullman Company and its ersatz union. Randolph became the BSCP's general organizer because he was known for "his long advocacy of the cause of organized labor," edited a national magazine (the Messenger quickly became the BSCP's official organ), and was not himself a porter (and was therefore immune from Pullman Company reprisals). He also recruited Frank Crosswaith as his special assistant. With help from the NAACP, Socialist-led garment unions, and the AFL, Crosswaith had recently founded the Trade Union Committee for Organizing Negro Workers, a bridge between blacks and organized labor. Crosswaith recognized that the BSCP offered enhanced opportunities for achieving this goal. Other important BSCP officials, especially local organizers, were recruited from porters or ex-porters fired for union activity.[30]
From the beginning, Randolph used ideas developed in the radical movement as arguments for the BSCP, and also linked the porters' specific grievances with larger racial concerns. The Messenger asserted that the porters represented "the best of the race," college graduates with training for medicine, the law, and other skilled vocations, who were excluded by white racism from the practice of their professions. They worked, Randolph said, "with closed lips and bursting hearts." Randolph attacked the porters' long hours (the longest of any American workers) and starvation wages, a mere 40% of what the U.S. government said was necessary for survival. ("No doubt your cigar bill is more than this," Randolph told a Pullman official). Porters were humiliated by customers and Pullman officials, subject to instant dismissal without due process, and denied all prospect of advancement. "No hope is held out to the Pullman porter. Once a porter, always a porter.... Every other class and race of workers" was rewarded with promotion; "white men who have little or no education have risen to the place of superintendents in the service, and Negro porters with a college education cannot even become a conductor," even though they often did conductor work. Randolph complained that the porters were in some respects worse off than slaves and that no group of white workers would tolerate such oppression.[31]
Randolph especially attacked the practice of tipping as inherently humiliating "professional begging," even if some porters did not recognize their degradation.
The fact that he or she does not regard professional mendicancy as degrading is one of the strongest reasons for abolishing the condition which makes it necessary; for it simply shows that the system is gradually dehumanizing him, converting him into a piece of inanimate equipment of the cars, insensible to the things that bring a flush of shame to the cheek of more manly men. In the nature of things, tiptakers can seldom develop the spirit of manhood of tip-givers. A tip-taker for a living, is compelled to giggle when his heart is well-nigh breaking with sorrow. He frowns and bends his knee in order to induce a feeling of generous geniality in prospective tippers, for herein lies his bread and butter. But fawning and singing and grinning and doing a buck and wing are not necessary elements of good service.
Tips were irregular and kept a porter in perpetual insecurity, with no means of planning his finances; if they were as high as the Pullman Company claimed, why did the company not collect them and pay porters a living wage? "The Brotherhood will destroy the obligation psychology," Randolph vowed.[32]
An independent union of, for, and by the porters was the only remedy for these grievances, Randolph emphasized. "A half century of exploitations of the Pullman porters by the Pullman company is irrefutable proof that the porters cannot rely upon the sympathy and good will of the Company," he said. "Organization, education and agitation is the only hope of the Pullman porters." Porters, like white railroad workers, "will never get justice until they have the power to demand it; and they will never have the power to demand it until they are organized." Randolph reminded the porters that "the Pullman stockholders have a union--namely, the corporation. It looks out for the interest of the stockholders. The officials of the corporation... represent them" and cannot represent the porters, whose interests contradict theirs. Randolph urged that with organization porters "can dignify their jobs. They can make them respected. At present they are the monkeys of the service. They are expected to sing and cut up capers as are unbecoming to a man.... This is not only an a disgrace to the porters, it is an insult to the race. The Company would not think of requesting any other group of workers in the service to carry on such monkey foolishness for the travelling public. Nor would the public expect it of any other group."[33]
Refurbishing his old radical rhetoric for use in a more specific cause, Randolph also attacked the "obligation psychology" fostered by the Pullman Company's welfare capitalism, epitomized by its PPBA. In language borrowed directly from the IWW, Randolph excoriated Pullman's sick and death benefits as "hokum" which the porters could find "in any insurance, fraternal or benevolent society which is unrelated to the company. Besides if they got proper wages they could plan for themselves. Moreover, even if the company gives sick and death benefits to the porters, that is no reason why they should not organize. For in fact the company is not giving them anything. The porters are giving sick and death benefits to themselves, but they don't know it." Because Pullman Company benefits tied workers to their job, these "benefits" constituted "real feudalism." The Pullman Company bragged that it helped porters whose families were in need, Randolph complained, but if the porters were adequately paid, they would not require such charity. Furthermore, company welfare workers (highly paid, coopted blacks recruited from the ranks of the porters) snooped into the most private affairs of the ordinary porters; according to Randolph, the Pullman Company knew when a porter had chicken for dinner. The Company rewarded porters with long and distinguished service with sergeant stripes, but "rights which the company is bound to respect are more important than stripes which only represent an empty honor." Randolph also used IWW rhetoric when he stated that the BSCP Convention would constitute "our economic legislature, legislating for the economic welfare of the porters."[34]
Randolph emphasized that the Pullman grievance procedure and the wage conference were likewise empty shams. The porters' representatives on grievance committees had no real power because company representatives dominated the committees; even when these biased organizations ruled in favor of a porter, the company often over-ruled them. Pullman officials were judge, jury, and prosecutor during disputes; Randolph denounced this as "an unethical, un-American and inconceivably unreasonable policy." The porters' representatives to the periodic wage conferences were often elected by intimidation and fraud, and were in any event powerless in the face of company domination. When the wage conferences did award minor increases, Randolph reminded the porters that the white railroad brotherhoods kept their unions despite their far higher wages. Furthermore, BSCP pressure, not the cage conference, was responsible for the increases. "Don't thank the Pullman Company; thank the Brotherhood. You never would have gotten anything were it not for the union." In April 1926, comparing the 8% wage increase granted the porters with BSCP initiation fees and dues, Randolph asserted that "if [the BSCP] got nothing more for the porters within the next two years, [the porters] have realized over a hundred percent on every dollar they will have invested in the union in the next two years."[35] Randolph also credited BSCP pressure with eliciting amelioration of some of the most egregious workplace abuses.
The Pullman Company employed the same tactics of "divide and rule," and of subsidizing black organizations and publications, of which Randolph had long complained. It threatened longtime porters with replacement by recent Southern migrants or Filipinos, purchased the support of mainstream black newspapers (including the Chicago Whip and the Chicago Defender), and distributed these papers free to the porters; it hired blacks as high-paid "welfare workers" and spies, and paid other blacks to Red-bait and slander Randolph and the BSCP as a Communist conspiracy against American institutions. Although Randolph secured the support of the NAACP and of many black churches and leaders, the Messenger complained that "strangely enough, the greatest opposition is not coming from a side frankly antagonistic to us; but from the very ones who would benefit most from a successful issue." Randolph responded sometimes with forbearance: "Let us not hate our detractors, for they must be saved with the expansive and redeeming love of the Brotherhood." Occasionally, however, he responded with blood-curdling rhetoric reminiscent of Garvey, as in his statement that the "slacker-porter" was "a traitor to himself, his family, and his race." A ranking BSCP official threatened "a day of reckoning when traitors of the race will come in for a full measure."[36]
Indeed, Randolph and other BSCP officers, using Garvey's language, excoriated the porters (and Afro-Americans in general) as largely responsible for their own problems. The cause of porter misery was not the Pullman Company but "the sheer, downright lack of manhood, of stamina, of guts and spirit on the part of the Pullman porters for the last fifty years," which was manifest in their "distrust of the ability of the Negro to do the things of a white man." Blacks too often "put all of our burdens and difficulties on the bent back of race and color, seeking an excuse for our lack of push, determination and will to succeed. Of course, race and color are factors in influencing our condition. But they are, by no manner or means, all. If we are real, red-blooded, he-men, we should not whine and cry over our lot, for it is within our own power to change it."[37]
Unity was essential. "Show that you have a higher sense of race solidarity," Randolph urged the porters. "Whencesoever we have come, we have a common heritage, common source, common interests and common enemies. Thus ours should be the slogan: each for all and all for each.... Demonstrate for once that you have spirit, guts, independence, manhood and the will to be freemen."[38] When the Pullman Company violated its own racial precedents and seniority rules by ostentatiously placing Filipino porters on the cars, Randolph told porters that the Filipino scare was but a ploy. The Pullman Company knew "the efficiency of the Negro worker who is the basis of its prosperity. The Company is not foolish enough to experiment with the producers of the only thing it sells--service, by employing a group of workers alien in language, customs and manners to the American public."[39] Randolph cited widespread public support for the BSCP, reminded the porters that all white railroad workers had successfully unionized, and asserted that, in any event, "it is better to maintain your manhood and get off the Pullman cars than to kow tow and lick the boots of the Pullman Company for a few crumbs which any other group of self-respecting men would reject. Negroes in the Pullman service had jobs before they went into the service and they can get jobs if they leave it."[40]
Randolph also addressed the issue of radicalism and Communism. When Red-baited, he proclaimed that he was a Socialist but that the BSCP fight was "not a political question, but an economic one". If doing "what every ordinary white trade union does," fighting for higher wages, "is radical, then we plead guilty." Randolph reiterated his anti-Communism and said that "the new porter is not a Communist, but a simple trade unionist, seeking only to become a better and a more useful citizen by securing a higher standard of living and preserving his manhood." He repeatedly characterized Pullman's starvation wages and autocratic labor policies as "un-American and in opposition to American traditions." In language strikingly reminiscent of that he had previously used when describing Socialism, Randolph said that the BSCP "is no far fetched, airy, impractical, visionary scheme but a sane, sober, sound, practical plan of action, borne out by the experiences of the workers over well nigh a century."[41]
In line with the "New Unionism" that characterized the Twenties, Randolph often claimed that the BSCP would benefit the Pullman Company. "Modern economic history irrefutably proves that union labor raises, instead of lowering production" he claimed. The BSCP "is not the enemy of the Pullman Company, but its friend.... It will save the enormous cost of high turnovers and secure a high type of porter who will improve the service and increase the income." Randolph claimed that "increased productive efficiency can only result from [the porter's] increased physical, moral and mental efficiency, which rest directly upon a higher standard of living, which in turn, can only be secured by a higher, regular income." Utilizing traditional values, Randolph said that "there can be no true home life when one is forced to fill his house full of strangers [boarders] for gain. It is morally unwholesome for children. In an unguarded moment, however, Randolph revealed his real sentiments when he called the Pullman Company "the enemy" who "has weakened and is ready to surrender." Furthermore, despite his disavowals, Randolph definitely envisioned a role for the porters in management.[42]
Clearly the BSCP could advance Randolph's long-sought economic education of the Negroes and the unity of black and white labor. The BSCP, Randolph claimed, gave blacks their greatest education in economic realities since emancipation. "Never before the advent of the Brotherhood has any systematic, definite, comprehensive agitation for economic labor organization as a method of solving the race problem been conducted among Negroes," he said. "Thus, the movement to organize the Pullman porters and maids has been a national school in economics for the race." Before this, he said, Negro education fostered either manual training or a useless classicism, while black organizations were religious or fraternal rather than economic. The BSCP, he proudly said, brought world-famous white intellectuals to address its members.
Randolph also proclaimed that although "Negro workers have fought nobly in the ranks of white workers in long industrial struggles, they have not known what it means to have the responsibility for the moral and financial maintenance of a struggle. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters is supplying this first experience." The Negro public also must experience struggle and sacrifice for its workers; after all, the wages of black labor paid the salaries of black professionals, provided the customers for Negro businessmen, and helped porters "pay their dues in their churches and lodges." White workers "cannot and will not organize [black workers]," Randolph asserted. "The history of the Jewish, Italian and Irish workers shows that various groups of workers must organize themselves. In the process of self-organization and self-struggle, Negro workers will develop the necessary labor view-point, sense of responsibility, a labor union morale and technique."[43]
In one demonstration of the convergence of former enemies in the mid-1920s, Du Bois heartily endorsed Randolph and the BSCP. Speaking of the porters, Du Bois said that "men of their intelligence and skill should long ago have organized." They had not unionized because "since the days of slavery the black laborer has been allied with the white capitalist. Since emancipation he has been bribed by philanthropy so that he thinks the thoughts of the rich, the powerful, the employing class. At the same time he has been kicked out of the major part of the white labor movement and his resultant resentment has helped his alignment with capital." Du Bois, however, proclaimed that the Afro-American worker was awakening and predicted that "the Pullman porters are going to have a union."[44]
Du Bois's endorsement of the BSCP unintentionally revealed his own ineradicable class bias, however--a bias that would forever hamper his efforts lead a radical mass movement among blacks. Simply put, Du Bois again confused himself with the masses of blacks. He praised the porters for performing "an unforgettable service" for "their own race. Without stirring racial animosities, with infinite tact and with sympathetic courtesy they have made it possible to travel with a minimum of insult and inconvenience. I have travelled 50,000 miles in every state of the union and without the ministrations of the Pullman Porters I should today be dead of exhaustion and shame."[45] Du Bois, however, ignored the palpable fact that very few Afro-Americans could afford Pullman berths. As was his habit, Du Bois generalized from his vastly atypical experience, and considered his own life as epitomizing that of the race.
Du Bois's class bias appeared in another of his pronouncements favoring the BSCP. He accurately catalogued the obstacles facing the BSCP: Pullman company purchase of the support or silence of black and white newspapers, U.S. government policies which favored corporations, and the racism of white labor unions. The Pullman Company formed a bogus, company union, and then forced the porters to accept that "union" or lose their jobs. But Du Bois responded by saying that "perhaps it is better to lose this job. Perhaps we have served as porters long enough. We were good slaves; but we outgrew the job. We were good cheap servants; we are outgrowing that job. We are good porters. But if being porters means being driven slaves and alms-taking servants, then God hasten the day when we outgrow that job." Du Bois's use of the word "we," however, elided a crucial distinction: the lives of the porters and their families depended upon their Pullman jobs. Du Bois, whose vastly higher salary was paid by the NAACP, rode in the Pullman cars, rather than working in them.[46]
Randolph more properly insisted that the BSCP's fight far transcended the interests of its immediate members and concerned the entire Negro race. In this belief, he continued his longstanding Socialist and racialist internationalism. "Our struggle is not for a week or a month or a year," he said, "but for all time. We are building for generations of black children unborn.... The landmarks of progress are the results of ceaseless, continuous and prolonged struggle."[47]
You have now passed the period of uncertainty. Men of vision and faith, women of hope and devotion, children yearning for a better world to live in, a world without race hatred and proscription, a world without ignorance and poverty, a world without slavery of body or mind, are patiently relying on you to bring them a little more sunshine, cheer, good-will and happiness, through your steadfast devotion to your movement.... This is a supreme test of your manhood. It is an acid test of the entire race. If you fail, the race fails; if you succeed, the race succeeds. Of course you will not fail, you cannot fail. Mistakes may delay your progress, wise counsel may hasten your progress, but one thing is certain, ultimate victory is assured. What you have done, white men have done. They succeeded, so can you.[48]
Linking the Brotherhood to worldwide and even cosmic events, Randolph proclaimed "The World of Color is stirring.... Tides of nationalism and racialism rise threateningly in the lands of ebon races to throw off their white capitalist oppressors." Revolt brewed within colored colonies and imperialist nations. This struggle for freedom "never ceases until all forms of freedom are won"--political, civic, and economic. The BSCP rose "to fulfill this cosmic condition as well as the particular needs of the Pullman porters and maids" and "marks an inevitable stage in the trend of race, social and labor progress."[49] Threatened with arrest and jail for articles attacking the Chicago Whip, Randolph declared that "Somebody must suffer for the progress of all great movements. It is the price of the advancement of humanity. We as a race must build up leaders who are willing to pay the price." The heirs of the noble abolitionists, such leaders must "re-dedicate our hearts and minds to the unfinished tasks of emancipation, so that Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and that vast throng of unknown and unsung heroes.... shall not have died in vain."[50] Randolph assured the porters that "all the millions of the Pullman Company could not cause me to desert you." The porters believed him; many asserted that the Pullman Company had literally given Randolph a blank check that he could make out for whatever sum he wanted if he would desert the union. Randolph, the story went, indignantly refused the bribe.[51]
Surveying the achievements of the Brotherhood after its first months, Randolph proclaimed that it heralded the arrival of "a New Negro" and "has awakened the black workers everywhere to a sense of their power, responsibility and rights."[52]
What have we done? We have built up the mightiest economic movement among Negroes in the world.... For the first time in the history of our race, we have formulated and presented to the public, a solid, sound, sane and sober program for the liberation of a large group of Negro workers in particular and the race in general.... The public respects you, organized labor admires you and the Company is concluding that you must be reckoned with.... Hundreds of millions, built upon your bent backs, coined out of your sweat and blood, have been thrown in the balance to beat you....[53]
The BSCP, Randolph continued, must become "indispensable to the Pullman industry." Its future was "tied up with the economic and social destiny of the race as a whole. Upon intelligent functioning of the Brotherhood will largely depend the future of the Negro worker in American industry.... Our high mission is to bring more sunlight into the life of men, more happiness to the world, to add to the sum total of human joy..... Long live the Brotherhood! The future belongs to the New Negro."[54] For Crosswaith the New Negro similarly represented far more than "the development of the Negro in the arts, and literature"; he heralded a new understanding of the social system under which he lived, and of the centrality of economic problems in race relations.[55]
Crosswaith praised the BSCP for inspiring white as well as black workers. "The Brotherhood's success has shattered many of the beliefs and left over ideas about the Negro worker and his capacity to function in the industrial realm; it has also given fresh courage to our friends who believe in the humanhood of the Negro race." BSCP success "sounds the advanced note of the arrival of the Negro worker into the ranks of organized labor," where it will tear down the divisive color bar and end capitalists' use of Negroes as scabs. "Already unorganized Negro workers in almost every industry are beginning to look with inquiring eyes to the Brotherhood for counsel and leadership in their endeavor to organize," Crosswaith claimed.[56]
Randolph's vision also transcended race. Recognizing "that the message of the Brotherhood and the cause of Negro labor must go beyond the boundaries of the colored world," Randolph sought "the ear and attention of the white public." He addressed universities, sororities, civic and social bodies, ministerial alliances, and labor bodies. "The Brotherhood has made the first systematic presentation of the cause of Negro wage earners to the white world, to white labor groups. Many of these white bodies had never heard of a Negro union or of Negroes who were interested in unionism. They had been led to believe that all Negroes were voluntary scabs." Similarly, at BSCP meetings blacks "saw what they had never seen before.... white labor leaders" exhorting black workers to victory.[57]
Randolph touted the BSCP's campaign against Pullman paternalism as heralding a new era for all workers. The BSCP's universal significance consisted in part in that it "has been the defiant spearhead against the movement of company unions in America," which organized labor had allowed to flourish without major opposition. "It was left to the Negro workers, expressed through the BSCP, to work out and execute a vigorous program on the company union movement." Black wage earners, "stigmatized as the classic scabs of America" would liberate "their white brothers from the despotism of company unionism." The Messenger published a devastating historical analysis of the origins of welfare capitalism in Rockefeller's Colorado Fuel and Iron company after the Ludlow Massacre.[58]
Randolph's fight for the BSCP, therefore, represented a fulfillment rather than a repudiation of his Socialist philosophy and hopes, adapted to the more hostile social climate of the 1920s. In line with his longstanding belief that revolution would result from immediate victories and rising expectations rather than from immiseration, Randolph fomented change in whatever venue he could. The BSCP embodied his beliefs in working-class interdependency, in unionism (interracial where possible, and exclusively black when necessary), and in black and working-class self-activity, as well as his fight against white capitalist hegemony over blacks and workers.
A brilliant orator and tireless organizer, Randolph achieved astounding success in enlisting not only Pullman porters, but a sizeable sector of the African-American community, in the cause of the porters and of unionism generally. Overcoming or transcending vehement opposition from traditionally anti-union churches, newspapers, politicians, and businessmen, Randolph pioneered a "community unionism" that energized porters' wives, society women, working-class blacks in other occupations, and, as the 1920s progressed, an increasing number of Afro-American leaders. As Spero and Harris said in The Black Worker (1931), the porter was "the only contact which thousands of white persons have with the race. His doings therefore assume an importance which extends beyond the confines of his own group and makes any organized movement on his part a matter of concern to the whole Negro population... It was well-nigh impossible for a Negro leader to remain neutral toward the union, and the position which he took toward it became a fundamental test."[59] Indeed, a black leader's stance towards the BSCP reflected his entire weltanschauung, his ultimate goals and his strategy for achieving them. Randolph made unionism a premier topic of discussion among Afro-Americans; and, by his eloquence, pleading, denunciations, and mass pressure, won many for his crusade.
Nevertheless, Randolph almost single-handedly destroyed the BSCP in 1928. He did this by trusting not in working-class or African-American power, but in the white supremacist power structure he had so long and so justly scorned. Disregarding the views of many knowledgeable union leaders and advisors, and trampling on the will of the rank and file, Randolph trusted that the United States government, the staunchly racist railroad brotherhoods, and the AFL would win for the BSCP power he did not believe porters could win for themselves. With all the good will in the world, Randolph committed a colossal blunder on the magnitude of Du Bois's "Close Ranks" fiasco. Randolph, like Du Bois, found that the white supremacist power structure matched his worst expectations rather than his fondest hopes. The resulting catastrophe largely discredited Randolph and the cause of Negro unionism, as well as destroying the Messenger.[60]
By 1926, Randolph's almost superhuman exertions had enlisted over half of the porters in the BSCP, despite their vulnerability to Pullman's intimidation and blandishments. However, the Pullman company, as most corporations, refused to recognize the union, much less negotiate with it. Instead of calling a strike, however, Randolph appealed to the Mediation Board established by the Railway Labor Act of 1926, thus entangling the porters for over eighteen months in obscure and secretive bureaucratic wrangling that left them dependent on a U.S. government agency which, predictably, betrayed them.[61]
The Railway Labor Act of 1926 was passed at the behest of the railroads and the "Big Four" railroad Brotherhoods, who represented skilled white railroad employees. (The Brotherhoods totally and explicitly excluded blacks). The Act established a Mediation Board charged with adjudicating disputes by voluntary mediation and, if that failed, voluntary arbitration. If neither of these methods worked, and a national emergency threatened (a major strike would cripple the nation's transportation system and undermine its economy), the Board could ask for an emergency Presidential Commission with powers to hear both sides and, in effect, impose a settlement. The railroads and the Brotherhoods maintained far different interpretations of the Act's main provisions and opposite hopes about its effects. The corporations assumed that the Act's machinery, culminating in a Commission appointed by the President, would avert strikes while containing the Brotherhoods; the workers, who had suffered massive U.S. repression in previous strikes, hoped that they could win concessions with federal support. However, everyone (except Randolph) realized that full government intervention would occur only under one condition: the credible threat of a strike that would tie up interstate commerce. Randolph trusted the Board because he wanted to work within the system--to show the "Big Four" and the AFL that a black union could play by white rules. This, he hoped, would win Brotherhood and AFL support for unionism among blacks. Indeed, Randolph had waited until the Railway Labor Act was passed, instead of asking for government intervention under a previous law, because the Brotherhoods approved of the new legislation.[62]
The Mediation Board agreed to hear the BSCP's case, and eventually certified the Brotherhood as the legitimate representative of the porters. However, the Pullman Company refused mediation and then arbitration. (Meanwhile, a separate BSCP appeal on different issues met rejection at the hands of the Interstate Commerce Commission). With scant other options, Randolph asked the exasperated BSCP members to authorize a strike, which they did by a whopping 6,053 to 17 vote. (Pullman employed about 11,000 men as porters and roughly 200 women as maids.) However, during the canvass for the strike vote, Randolph equivocated about whether he would actually call a strike if authorized. This both encouraged a "yes" vote by BSCP members (who were not necessarily risking an actual strike), and emboldened the Pullman Company and its government henchmen (who recognized that Randolph was bluffing). Some prominent BSCP leaders wanted a strike backed by militant action to keep scabs off the cars and otherwise disrupt Pullman operations. Some militants even envisioned recruiting women and children to sit on the tracks and block trains. Randolph, however, wanted not a strike but only the threat of a strike, which he hoped would evoke a Presidential Commission and, after the resultant publicity about the porters' grievances, a just settlement. He feared, with good reason, that a strike would result in the destruction of the BSCP and the loss of jobs for most of its members. As leader of the BSCP, therefore, he manipulated the porters and the union leadership to force an artificial confrontation that, he hoped, would result in Pullman concessions extracted by an anxious government. He was even received by President Coolidge, who expressed his heartfelt sympathy but claimed he could not issue a statement urging a settlement.[63]
The Pullman Company, confident that it could crush the BSCP, notified its on-call porters, hired scabs, mobilized its supporters in the black community, and made token concessions. It virtually imprisoned some porters in its cars, feeding them as it awaited a possible strike. Meanwhile, a representative of the Mediation Board travelled from the District of Columbia to Chicago and, in a secret and informal meeting, inquired about Pullman's wishes. He was told that the strike threat was illusory and that the Pullman Company opposed the convening of a Presidential Commission. The Board member supervising the case told his colleagues that "if anything approaching a real strike could have been staged with any hope of success, it would have been done long ago." The Board's chair exulted that this was "exactly the information we wanted to get." The Board then scuttled the idea of a President's Commission on the grounds that a strike of Pullman porters would not constitute an emergency: Pullman coaches were luxuries, not essential for the operation of the railroads. In fact, however, the Board knew that Randolph was bluffing--using the threat of a strike precisely to evoke an emergency Commission. They refused to ask Coolidge for an emergency Commission for the same reason that Randolph wanted one: by forcing some negotiation and concessions, a Commission would, under the existing circumstances, have implicitly favored the union. The Mediation Board would ask Coolidge for a Commission at the behest of a company, but not of a union--especially a Negro union.[64]
Randolph now confronted a self-induced dilemma: if he was only bluffing, many BSCP officers and members were not. Once their appeal had been rejected by the Board, the porters could only risk a strike (and their jobs) or abjectly surrender. Randolph surreptitiously contacted William Green, the racist head of the racist AFL, and asked that Green telegraph the BSCP "advising" a "postponement" of the strike until times were more propitious. (Neither Green nor Randolph explained, or could have explained, what this meant). Randolph used this last-minute telegram as an excuse to "postpone" (in reality cancel) the strike. According to Spero and Harris, "frantic efforts were made to make the strike fiasco appear to have been a well-considered and carefully planned procedure which added immeasurably to the strength and standing of the union.... Handbills in this vein flooded the Negro districts. The Negro papers were filled with such statements."[65]
In fact, Randolph's action--taken with scant consultation of the other leaders, and none whatsoever with the membership--almost destroyed the BSCP. The porters, demoralized after endless waiting, petitioning, organizing, and hoping, quit the union in droves. The Pullman Company fired or suspended those it suspected of voting to authorize the strike. Amidst the ruins many blacks, and not only porters, castigated Randolph as a temporizer, a secretive autocrat, a fraud, a traitor, a self-aggrandizing publicity hound, and even a crook in the tradition of Marcus Garvey. The Messenger, already struggling, ingloriously and immediately ended its 11-year history. Leaders who had warned Randolph that the Railway Labor Act was suitable only for powerful unions that could, in the absence of an imposed settlement, disrupt the railroads, felt vindicated. Precisely because Randolph had extolled the union as a shining hope for African Americans generally, and indeed of a new era of militant activism and inter-racial cooperation, the collapse of the BSCP discredited not only Randolph and the BSCP, but the larger visions with which Randolph had associated it. The AFL, which viewed blacks in general and Randolph in particular with disdain and suspicion, rejected the BSCP's application for a regular charter, and instead enrolled individual locals under the Jim-Crow mechanism traditionally used to segregate, marginalize, and destroy Afro-American unions. The "Big Four" Brotherhoods predictably offered no support of any kind, and, as always, viciously excluded blacks.[66]
Like Du Bois, Randolph had trusted mainstream institutions, and like Du Bois he (predictably) suffered betrayal. Perhaps the illusion of access to power, and the longing for a chimerical "inclusion" in institutions that designedly excluded and humiliated blacks, partly motivated both men. Certainly both Du Bois and Randolph attacked their black opponents with a vituperation seldom heaped upon high-ranking whites. However, both men could argue that they had little real choice: the governments, corporations, and unions arrayed against Afro-America were totally unscrupulous, and routinely destroyed the lives of people of any race or sex who indulged in mass action. Du Bois, Randolph, and other African Americas faced an intractable dilemma that constitutes, in its way, the essence of American history. Excluded groups, who now as always comprise the majority of Americans, can exercise power within the system only by massing power outside of it. Mainstream institutions serve the few who own them, and will compromise with outsiders only when those outsiders credibly threaten massive disruption. Only by building alternative institutions outside of existing structures--countercultural organizations fully owned by the wronged and oppressed--can the "victims of democracy" make their voices heard. However, mainstream institutions respond to such threats with terrorism. The BSCP won (a temporary) victory (during the Great Depression), only after massive social upheavals had evoked new labor laws and indeed new unions.
Although Spero and Harris, writing three years after BSCP's debacle, offered no realistic alternative strategy (they adamantly insisted that a strike would have been crushed), their conclusions paralleled those of other contemporary observers:
The great pity of the virtual collapse of the porter's union lies not merely in its effect upon the porters who have grievances which sorely need correction but in its effect upon Negro labor generally. The hope that this movement would become the center and rallying point of Negro labor as a whole is now dead. Of course a substantial nucleus of the Brotherhood still remains intact, and it may be that in another crisis it will again grow into an important movement. The chances are, however, that it will be a long time before Randolph or any other leader of this group will again be presented with opportunities as favorable as those which were missed.[67]
Simultaneously with the BSCP's organizing campaign, however, Afro-American intellectuals discovered yet another arena where they could fight for social justice--the realm of creative literature. The career of Claude McKay, a precursor of the Harlem Renaissance, epitomized the pitfalls in this endeavor.
Notes:
[1] "The American Federation of Labor," TM, October 1923.
[2] "Labor Day," TM, September 1923.
[3] APR, "Industrial Unionism," TM, May-June 1928; A.W. Johnson, "The Coal Miners At Bay," TM May-June 1928. Johnson was one of the highest Afro-American officials in the UWM.
[4] "The American Civil Liberties Union," TM, December 1921; "The United Front," TM, May 1922; "The Negro Democrat," TM, September 1924; CO, "How the Negro Should Vote in this Campaign," TM, September 1924.
[5] CO, "How the Negro Should Vote in this Campaign," TM, September 1924; "Chas. H. Roberts," TM, October 1924.
[6] APR, "The Political Situation and the Negro," TM, October 1924.
[7] ibid.
[8] ibid.
[9] APR, "The Election in Retrospect," TM, December 1924.
[10] "The Menace of the Negro Communists," TM, August 1923; GSS, "The Socialist Party and the Negro," August 1923; "The Sanhedrin," TM, October 1923.
[11] Editorial, "Send Owen to Congress," TM, February 1928; Editorial, "Negro Congressmen, TM, March 1928; Editorial, "The National Skeleton, TM May-June 1928.
[12] James Ivy, "Book Bits," of Maynard Shipley's The War on Modern Science, TM, February, 1928.
[13] Editorial, "The Presidential Race," TM, March 1928; Editorial, "The Candidates," TM, May--June 1928.
[14] Ivy, "Book Bits," review of Upton Sinclair's Money Writes, TM, March 1928.
[15] James Ivy, "Book Bits," review of Charles Morrison's The Outlawry of War, TM, February 1928.
[16] James Ivy, "Book Bits," review of Warren Brokaw's Society and How to Create It, TM, February 1928. Note Ivy's exquisite use of "plain" for "plane."
[17] James Ivy, "Book Bits," review of Max Eastman's Marx and Lenin, TM, May-June 1928.
[18] James Ivy, "Book Bits," review of William Z. Foster's Misleaders of Labor, TM, April 1928.
[19] James Ivy, "Book Bits," review of Prosperity? edited by Harry Laidler and Norman Thomas, TM, April 1928. The phrase "shoals [or reefs] of roast beef and apple pie" is a famous quotation from German sociologist Werner Sombart, whose 1906 book, Why is There No Socialism in the United States? was perhaps the first sustained attempt to answer that perennial question.
[20] Editorials, TM, November 1920; "The Negro and the New Social Order," TM, March 1919; "National Brotherhood Workers Convention," TM, December 1919; "Immigration and Japan," TM, August 1924. Randolph opposed banning "any group because of race of color"; a total ban would affect all races equally.
[21] "The Woman's Party and the Negro," TM, September 1924.
[22] In a sad commentary on black capitalism, the Negro Business number, originally scheduled for October, was postponed because many businesses, despite Randolph's entreaties, did not submit their material on time.
[23] "A Garvey Myth," TM, November 1923; "Business and Labor," TM November 1923.
[24] Abner, "Fraternal Insurance," TM, November 1923; Perry, "Life Insurance in Our Racial Development," TM, November 1923; "Negro Youth Movement," TM, March 1924.
[25] Thomas L. Dabney, "Can Negro Business Survive," TM, April 1928.
[26] ibid.
[27] Editorial, "Consumers' Cooperation," TM, May-June 1928.
[28] TL, "Theatre," TM, December 1923.
[29] "Exalting Negro Womanhood," TM, January 1924.
[30] "A Bit of History," TM December 1925; APR, "The Truth About the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters," TM February 1926; Frank Crosswaith, "Toward the Home Stretch," TM July 1926; APR, "The Case of the Pullman Porters," TM July 1925; APR, "Pullman Porters Need Their Own Union," TM August 1925; William H. Harris, Keeping the Faith: A. Philip Randolph, Milton Webster, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 1925-1937 (Urbana, 1991), 1-65. For a full account of Crosswaith's career see John H. Seabrook's unpublished dissertation, "Black and White Unite: The Career of Frank R. Crosswaith" (Rutgers, 1980).
[31] A Sagittarius, "A Dip into Speculative Philosophy," TM, April 1925; APR, "An Open Letter to EF Carry," TM, January 1926; APR, "Pullman Porters Need Their Own Union," TM, August 1925; APR, "The Pullman Company and the Pullman Porters," TM, September 1925.
[32] APR, "A Reply to Pullman Propaganda," TM, October 1926.
[33] "The Wage Conference," TM, February 1926; APR, "The Case of the Pullman Porter," TM, July 1925; ARP, "Randolph's Reply to Howard Perry," TM, October-November 1925; APR, "Pullman Porters Need Their Own Union," TM, August 1925.
[34] APR, "A. Philip Randolph Answers New Questions for Perry Howard," TM, December 1925; APR, "The New Pullman Porter," TM, April 1926; "Wage Conference," TM, February 1926; APR, "Open Letter to the Pullman Company," TM, July 1927; APR, "An Open Letter to Mr. E.F. Carry, TM, January 1926; APR, "To the Organizing Committee," TM, August 1926; APR, "The State of the Brotherhood," TM, June 1926; APR, "Pullman Porters Need Their Own Union," TM, August 1925; APR, "The Case of the Pullman Porter," TM, July 1925.
[35] APR, "An Open Letter to E.F. Carry," TM, January 1926; APR, "A Letter to Delegates to Pullman Company's Wage Conference," TM, February 1926; APR, "What the Joining Fees are Used For," TM, April 1926.
[36] A Saggitarius, "The Leap of Marcus Curtius," TM, February 1927; APR, "To the Brotherhood Men," TM, March 1926; "The Slacker-Porter," TM, June 1926; A.L. Totten, "Pullman Soothing Salve," TM, January 1926.
[37] APR, "Our Next Step," TM, July 1926.
[38] APR, "The Pullman Company and the Pullman Porter," TM, September 1925.
[39] "Randolph's Reply to Perry Howard," TM,, October-November 1925. Commenting on Pullman threats to replace blacks with Filipinos, Randolph stated: "Nor do I say this in condemnation of the Filipinos. They have a right to work anywhere they can get a job. It is simply a question of the fact that the Pullman Company will use Filipinos to discourage Pullman porters from organizing just as it will use Negroes to keep white employees from organizing. It is not that the Company loves the Filipinos more, but that it loves a real union less." APR, "The Employee Representation Plan," TM, January 1927. Randolph was correct; although the Pullman Company experimented with Mexican and Chinese porters (on runs to Mexico and the West Coast, respectively), it soon returned to its practice of hiring only African Americans as porters.
[40] APR, "Randolph's Reply to Perry Howard," TM, October-November 1925.
[41] "A Philip Randolph Answers New Questions to Perry Howard," TM, December 1925; "Wage Conference," TM,, February 1926; APR, "An Open Letter to Frank O. Lowden," TM,, August 1926.
[42] APR, "To the Organizing Committee," TM, August 1926; APR, "The State of the Brotherhood," TM, June 1926; APR, "Pullman Porters Need Their Own Union," TM, August 1925; APR, "The Case of the Pullman Porter," TM, July 1925.
[43] APR, "The State of the Brotherhood," TM, February 1927; "Editorials," TM, August 1927; APR, "To the Organizing Committee," TM, May 1926.
[44] DB Editorial, "The Black Man and Labor," TC, December 1925. This was the same editorial which guardedly endorsed the American Negro Labor Congress.
[45] DB, "Again Pullman Porters," TC, April 1926.
[46] DB Editorial, "The Black Man and Labor," TC, December 1925; DB, "Again, Pullman Porters," TC, April 1926. Du Bois attacked the U.S. government's policy in "Pullman Porters," TC, January 1926. Randolph, of course, did not risk his job by his union activity; the porters asked Randolph to represent him partly because he was not employed by the Pullman Company, and was therefore immune from direct Company pressure and retaliation.
[47] APR, "Our Next Step," TM, July 1926.
[48] APR, "Notes of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters," TM, January 1926.
[49] APR, "The State of the Brotherhood," TM, February 1927.
[50] APR, "The Indictment," TM, April 1926.
[51] APR, "The Pullman Company and the Pullman Porters," TM, September 1925; Jack Santino, Miles of Smiles: Stories of Black Pullman Porters (Urbana, 1989), 61-67.
[52] APR, "To the Brotherhood," TM, March 1926.
[53] ibid.
[54] ibid.
[55] Crosswaith, "Crusading for the Brotherhood," TM, June 1926.
[56] Crosswaith, "Toward the Home Stretch," TM, July 1926.
[57] APR, "The State of the Brotherhood," TM, February 1927; APR, "Notes of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters," TM, January 1926.
[58] APR, "The IRT and the American Federation of Labor," TM, December 1927; Benjamin Chase, "Binding the Worker to His Job," TM, July 1926. For a more recent, yet similar analysis of company unionism and the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company plan, see David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor (Cambridge: New York, 1989), 343-350, 411-464.
[59] Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 430.
[60] Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 430-460; Anderson, Randolph, 187-215, Harris, Keeping the Faith, 84-116.
[61] ibid.
[62] ibid.
[63] ibid.
[64] ibid.
[65] ibid. The Spero and Harris quote is on page 458.
[66] ibid.
[67] Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 460.