The strenuous life does not seem to have left its mark on David Gordin. A Webster panatella, half of which he chews rather than smokes, punctuates his hard, yet not unpleasant features. Gordin’s clothes always fit well—tailored by Billy Taub, they are the penultimate in Seventh Avenue styles; the four pointed ends of a white hand-rolled handkerchief effectively break the thin vertical pinstripes and his ties show elaborate floral designs. In fact, Gordin, who pronounces his name in the Russian way, Gordin, is virtually indistinguishable from the manufacturers he now includes among his many friends.
Mr. and Mrs. David Gordin live in a well-appointed five-room apartment on West End Avenue; three months of the year they divide between the Oceanside Hotel at Miami and Gross’ Rest House in the Catskills. Gordin is normally an energetic man and his perennial suntan enhances his appearance of good health. Mrs. Gordin is an active member of several ladies’ organizations, and during the war has greatly enjoyed wearing her blue-gray home front uniform.
Mr. Gordin spends his evenings playing pinochle with friends while his wife learns the intricacies of mah jong. To make a killing at cards affords him incalculable pleasure; not infrequently he will convert a week-end in the country into an extended card game. Gordin openly concedes that a comfortable middle-class existence has its points; and he maintains, sometimes a bit over-emphatically, that it is no wise inconsistent with his long history, position, or usefulness as a labor leader.
Manager of his union’s Joint Board, Gordin occupies a strategic position in the middle strand of organized labor’s hierarchy. As a top union representative he is often busy negotiating contracts with manufacturers’ associations. Much of his official time, however, is spent talking about inner union affairs with the members of his immediate Joint Board coterie. This little domain of union intimates generally defers to its boss’s views, as Gordin himself yields to the opinions of the president of the Nation General Office. It is not a hard life.
Yet there is a marked uneasiness these days about Gordin. This first appeared when he found it necessary to select Italian and Spanish-speaking organizers. “In the old days,” he says, “I could talk to the people in the shops myself. Now you got to be a regular linguist.” Before the Great Depression the union’s membership was largely Jewish, but in recent years it has been recruited from all stocks—Italian, Puerto Rican, Negro. Jews today comprise less than a third of the industry’s workers. The union leadership may very well change, too. Gordin recognizes the inevitable, and he is not happy about it. “Look!” he will exclaim. He uses the word “look” as a friendly invitation to examine his statements carefully. “The Italians and the others always take their kids into the shops with them. They teach them the trade and make workers out of them. We Jews, when we’re workers, we’re not really workers. We’re middle class and our children have to be lawyers and teachers and business men. And don’t forget the doctors. So in the end there’s got to be change in the trade.”
The leadership, Gordin also admits in his more analytical moments, tends to become self-perpetuating and bureaucratic and to develop interests with which the average union member is but little concerned. The rankand-file, however, does not seem to be troubled as long as its demands are satisfied. “A union today is like a corporation. The membership is like the stockholders and the officers are like the Board of Directors. As long as the Board of Directors pay dividends the stockholders are happy.”
Recently the Joint Board, with the approval of the General Office, increased Gordin’s salary from $8,500 to $9,500. “The General Office boys get more than that,” says Gordin. “If the membership didn’t think they were worth it, believe you me they would raise a row. But it’s not so much the big salaries that count; it’s the difference in jobs—that’s what changes people.” The average worker’s life, remarks Gordin, is unfortunately narrow, being restricted to shop and home. The union leader has a broader horizon. “We meet important people, you know. Manufacturers, politicians, writers,” he says with a slightly sardonic gleam in his eyes.
When the General Office embarked upon an ambitious program of workers’ education some years ago Gordin expressed his doubts. “A union should maybe teach trade unionism, but poetry and how to paint a landscape? Why should we compete with colleges?” The union’s educational director tells a story that illustrates the limits Gordin places on education. “Tell me,” Gordin once asked him, “what are you going to teach the workers?”
“We’ll have classes in labor history . . . English . . . the economics of the industry,” was the reply.
“Anything else?” asked Gordin, after nodding his approval of each subject mentioned.
“And we’d like to give classes in parliamentary law,” concluded the educational department’s representative.
“No, that’s not so good,” mused Gordin, scratching his head. “Already they are making too many motions.”
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Gordin is not a florid orator. He speaks simply, punctuating his talks with anecdotes drawn from his long experience in the labor movement. This is effective with small groups, especially when reinforced by the authority of the manager of the Joint Board. The president of the General Office has always recognized Gordin as a masterful organizer. During a wage conference years ago, the employer, exasperated by Gordin’s hard-headedness, shouted. “Why are you holding up things just for a drop in the bucket?” Gordin quickly reached for the man’s drinking glass, shook a drop of ink into it from a pen and said, “Go ahead, drink it. It’s only a drop.”
On rare occasions Gordin may be prevailed upon to “fix” things for a friend; a little favor for members of his inner circle helps keep the peace. But in matters of union policy he is strictly on the side of the angels, provided the angels agree with him and the General Office. He will listen courteously to small gossip, but he is shrewd enough to discount most of what is whispered into his ear. Gordin can be quite flexible; he has time and again exhibited in internal union affairs a remarkable resiliency. Yet he knows how to be ruthless in order to retain the power that is his—he enjoys power.
Gordin may know little of music, the arts or literature; but he does know his own industry. His approach to problems is compounded of ninety per cent hard-boiled pragmatism and ten per cent uplift idealism. The school of hard knocks, he says, is a great training ground.
Gordin’s matter-of-fact common sense is peculiarly flavored with a kind of special realism. In the old country ideals were essentially protests against the dispossession of the Jews; in a new land of opportunity those ideals faded into the background. But practicality remained and Gordin discovered that he had little difficulty in accommodating himself to the hard-boiled demands of union life. Accommodation gradually permeated all his thought processes; his generally vague feeling for socialism was assimilated with his even more inchoate feeling for Zionism. Gordin’s life is a case study in adaptation.
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David Gordin was born in the early 1880’s in a small Russian village located in the western province of Viebesk. The youngest of four sons, he grew up in the country. Gospodin Gordin was a wheat-miller, a rare occupation for a Jew in Old Russia, and David ran about raising pigeons and swimming in the village creek. The Gordins were not as orthodox as most Jewish families and David’s education had a decidedly secular bent. He was sent to the nearby Gymnasium and his father urged him to prepare for the bar. A Jewish lawyer in Czarist Russia, thought the old man, would really be an accomplishment.
The young man’s contact with one of the many revolutionary study circles proved disastrous to his father’s bright expectations. The little underground group pretended to be reviewing the latest developments in geological science; actually they staged fiery readings of Kropotkin, Bebel, Plekhanov and Marx. David joined the Bund, the Jewish section of the Social-Democratic Party, and when the millers’ union went on strike, David heroically helped picket his father’s establishment. “I can still see the old man,” muses Gordin today, “standing at the window and pulling on his beard. But I could see also he was smiling at me.”
But David soon found himself lodged in a none too comfortable provincial jail. The influence of his family could not prevent David’s exile to Siberia, where he was sent to meditate on the revolutionary follies of youth.
David’s meditation was not too prolonged; a few months of frigid solitude and he walked out of his Siberian hut. “The Bund, however,” Gordin now relates, “had other plans for me. As ‘soon as I get home they decide that I got to go back to Siberia, to Irkutsk, to contact an underground gun runner. And in the middle of winter, too.” Gordin speaks of this revolutionary enterprise with great relish, but it seems somehow apocryphal. Members of his family do not recall the incident; they will shrug their shoulders and say, “If Dave says so it must be so.” At any rate, the subterranean political life quickly lost its glamour; David began to dream of America. His father approved and supplied him with money for papers and passage, and David eventually found himself aboard a crawling freighter out of Hamburg.
At Castle Garden, wire caging and a babel of tongues greeted him. “So America,” thought Gordin, “puts you in jail first.” Yet he slept comfortably on his baggage that night, for he knew that his cousin Avremal, who had preceded him here by several years and was doing well, would call in the morning. But it was not until the next evening that Avremal at long last escorted him out Castle Garden, explaining with much headshaking that his boss, a schwartz yor auf em, had refused to give him the day off.
Avremal’s Pike St. tenement flat rudely destroyed Gordin’s expectations. He slept on three chairs placed side by side along the kitchen washtubs and covered with an old Russian perene, a kind of heavy down quilt. Early the following day Avremal dragged a still aching and protesting cousin off to work to earn his keep. “I got a job waiting for you, you ungrateful hound!” screamed Avremal, disregarding Gordin’s protests that he didn’t know his cousin’s trade.
“Such foolishness. You’ll learn, but quick.” Gordin did learn and after several months his weekly pay-check reached the handsome sum of fourteen dollars.
“But such shop conditions!” Gordin now exclaims. “The boss kept the fire-escape doors closed so Satan shouldn’t tempt us to get a breath fresh air. And the place was five stories up with no elevator. It’s a good thing I had a strong heart. You know, it was bosses like that who made the union.”
The foremen were petty tyrants and relished their power. If the workers earned too much, piece-rates were reduced. Stiff fines were imposed for minute infractions of factory rules. It was this practice that cost Gordin his first job. “I made a small damage to one of the articles and the foreman began to scream and yelp and tells me that I’m fined two dollars. So I tell him to jump into Central Park Lake. So he yells, ‘You’re fired!’” Gordin’s friends insist that the incident was more violent than that.
His revolutionary ardor re-aroused by this incident, Gordin joined the union. But he soon learned that its leaders were not interested in his designs for a new social order. They were more concerned with strengthening their craft status in the industry and sneered at the new-comers who didn’t know what constituted an American trade union. Gordin joined the Socialist faction; the radicals insisted through leaflets, at meetings and in the columns of the Forward that the whole trade, skilled and unskilled, had to be organized.
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Sweatshop conditions, repressions and fines created a situation which reached a boiling point in 1911 The Socialist opposition finally forced the union leaders to call a mass meeting. “For almost-two hours the Old Guard paraded up and down to the platform and talked about our grievances all around in circles.” Suddenly one of the young militants asked for the floor. Reluctantly recognized, he hurled a Yiddish tirade at the heads of the old guard and closed with an impassioned plea for a general strike. Pandemonium broke loose and union officers grudgingly acquiesced to rank and file demands. A strike committee composed of local union representatives was formed and Gordin received his first taste of union power. His local unanimously elected him to the strike committee.
The strike dragged on for three months. One day a newspaper reporter told Gordin that the General Office had called off the industry-wide strike. An agreement had been reached with the employers’ association. “I almost had a heart-attack,” says Gordin. By two in the morning, the strike committee had prepared thousands of leaflets calling upon the workers to reject the treacherous agreement. “Boy, did I get a real charley-horse from turning the crank of the printing machine,” Gordin recalls. “Because the old guard thought they could discredit the Socialist faction they make a settlement. And what a settlement!” Virtually none of the workers’ claims had been met. The following morning thousands of strikers gathered in front of the Forward building on East Broadway to shout their indignation. The strike continued until a more satisfactory agreement was reached, and at the next convention the old guard was immediately voted out of office. In his own local Gordin was elected to the important post of business agent. Thus began the rise of David Gordin.
“Getting the union organized in the trade, you know, wasn’t exactly easy,” Gordin informs us. “Competition was something fierce. Manufacturers cut prices and the workers got it in the end. And on top of that the worker only wanted to become a boss; a couple dollars, a couple machines, a package of letterheads printed with your name, and you were a manufacturer.”
Lack of standardization and seasonal conditions added to the tragic chaos. Union membership too was seasonal. When business improved the workers went on strike for higher wages and better conditions. The organizer would quickly print a thousand crude leaflets. “What propaganda!” Gordin recalls. “We used to write: ‘Murder! The exploiters! The vampires of the working class—the manufacturers! Join the Union! Pay your Dues! Down with Capitalism!’ The bosses would sign an agreement, the workers would go back to the shops and then forget to pay their dues. So we had a union without members. Then the wage cuts began all over again—every season like clock work it was the same old circle.”
Gordin’s union hobbled along that way for a long time. Most of his energies were spent in urging union members to pay their back dues; special collections to prevent the padlocking of headquarters were not infrequent. Members were always apologizing; the last poker game had been unfortunate or another baby was expected next week.
Organizers, when found talking to employees, were often arrested for obstructing traffic. A worker would be seen speaking to a picket and the next day he was fired: skilled-craft workers were taken home in private cars to prevent their contamination with unionism. Labor leaders were called “crooks” and “reds.” The police set up danger-zones around strike-bound buildings and any picket who dared to cross the forbidden boundary was given a free ride to the Tombs.
Employers frequently found refuge in the courts; judges sympathetic to the cause of free enterprise were not averse to granting blanket injunctions against the union. Penalties for disorderly conduct, vagrancy and contempt were often imposed upon arrested pickets. In one instance, Gordin recalls, the presiding magistrate shouted, “You are on strike against God and Nature, whose law it is that man shall earn his bread in the sweat of his brow.”
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Organizing campaigns and strikes are costly affairs and Gordin has always carefully scrutinized the expense accounts of his staff. During one strike an organizer came to him with an itemized bill for $700.
“Can’t you make it cheaper?” asked Gordin.
“OK, make it $600,” replied the organizer.
“No, no. A little cheaper,” pressed Gordin.
“All right, make it $400.”
“You dog,” shouted Gordin as he grabbed the man by the collar, “so you can afford $300 out of your own pocket!” Thus ended the union career of one organizer.
To Gordin a union is only as strong as its treasury. The manifold activities, including organizing, administration, research and recreation, require large staffs. And the union must always be prepared to face severe emergencies. In its last financial statement, administration and organizing expenses totalled well over $500,000. Net assets were close to $5,000,000, with a cash surplus of about one million. “Some day and maybe sooner than we like to expect,” warns Gordin, “we’ll be needing a reserve like that.”
Gordin’s vocabulary, which used to make him sound like a footnote to the Communist Manifesto, is now quite respectable. Forty years ago he believed in uplift unionism; to him trade unions were the carriers of a socialist civilization. Now he feels that the purpose of a union is job protection within a capitalistic framework. When asked to justify the change, he will say, “When a man at twenty is not a radical he has no heart, but if at fifty he is not a little bit conservative he has no head.”
Perhaps this shift towards conservatism was accelerated by the violent factionalism that flared up in the union during the twenties. Left extremists began to see unionism as a means for creating a Soviet America. “Left-wing councils to save the union from us ‘labor fakers’ were set up. Soon they began to act like a union inside a union; they started collecting dues and even called strikes on their own. Boy, we had our hands full. Everything the General Office and the Joint Board did was betrayal and a sellout. They were a real nuisance.”
The General Office quickly moved to excommunicate the left-wing councils for committing the cardinal sin of unionism—the fostering of a dual organization. To isolate the rebels, one infected local was cut in half, but no sooner were the two new locals established than the hydra-headed left-wing appeared in both. Gordin fought the left opposition stubbornly, deploying his forces as skillfully as any municipal politician.
The Trade Union Educational League, the Communists’ union arm, called for a “united front from below” and urged the comrades to “bore from within.” The General Office discovered certain officials consorting secretly with Communist Party representatives and promptly expelled them. Yet the left-wingers managed to filter back into the union where they maintained a powerful but futile barrage of invective.
In 1926 the national convention witnessed the final large-scale parliamentary battle between the incumbents and the leftwing. If not for the skilled-craft locals’ staunch support of the General Office, the radicals would have displaced the old hierarchy. The balconies in the convention hall were filled with leftist adherents, booing, hissing and stamping. The Daily Worker published streams of vilification; the entrenched administration were gangsters and stool-pigeons, gunmen and agents provocateurs.
The old leadership, much to the noisemakers’ chagrin, was returned to office. The following year, however, the union was all but wrecked by a strike called and directed by several of the Communist-dominated locals, set on making one more display of strength against the General Office. The strike lasted for months and when it was finally settled the union had lost virtually all its gains of the previous five years. “That strike finished off the left-wing,” says Gordin. “The General Office and the Joint Board checked into the way the strike corn mittee ran the show, and out of three million dollars spent on the strike they could only account for about a million and a half.”
It was during this disastrous strike that the underworld first effectively penetrated the industry. Employers hired professional gunmen to waylay and assault pickets and the frantic left-wing strike committee retaliated by employing other gangsters. But Gordin himself is not loath to make occasional use of “educational squads.” In fact, his earliest introduction to industrial warfare was as a heavy-fisted ‘educator.’ “Look!” exclaims Gordin as he emphatically waves his cigar in the direction of his auditor, “the union has been through plenty violence. Like the time some boss offered me $5,000 and a good job if I would quit the union. We were following his goods to see that they didn’t go to non-union finishing places. I told this boss to go jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, and he tells me to watch out. So the next day I get caught early in the morning near the Square by a couple of guys who start beating me up. Oh, what a fight! Well, anyway I knew what that guy meant, I should watch out. But regular gangsters are different. They’re leeches, they get hold of you and they don’t let go. An ‘educational squad’ is something else; it’s part of the union’s defense and at least it’s the union’s own members.”
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Racketeers once tried to get a foothold in the industry by securing control of the shipper’s local. Partially processed goods were often sent to finishing factories and it was that local’s function to see that the products did not go to non-union shops. Although the trade still seemed busy, many metropolitan finishing establishments did not have sufficient orders to keep them alive. Gordin set about gathering evidence. He collected enough facts to prove that the officials of the local were conspiring with underworld elements and unscrupulous manufacturers to have the work sent to out-of-town non-union shops.
The Joint Board quietly moved in. “While we were meeting at headquarters to pass a resolution seizing the records and premises of the shippers’ local we had our man ready at a phone booth near their building, and as soon as the resolution was passed we called him to go ahead. He walked up to the local’s offices and slapped the resolution on the manager before he knew what hit him. Of course, they yelled ‘unconstitutional,’ and threatened to sue in the courts, but the jig was up. They were finished and the racketeers were out—at least for awhile.”
That was in the twenties; a decade later the gangsters too were organized. Racketeering became a highly specialized business that sold its services to unwilling buyers. An employer would be told that he ought to be “protected” against unionization; the employer did not dare to refuse the service. Union business agents were then asked to cooperate. To spurn the underworld hint meant blackjacks and brass knuckles.
Complete unionization provides the only certain barrier against the racketeering cancer, says Gordin. “As long as an industry is upset some chiseler will hire gangsters to try to get rid of the union. He thinks it will be cheaper for him that way. You know how we finally got rid of the racketeers? We started to organize all the shops, including all the places that bought protection. A strike was called and an ‘educational committee’ of about a thousand workers went into the district and we cleaned out the gangsters. The whole trade was organized and we haven’t had any trouble by rackets since then. At least not too much, anyway.
Gordin’s philosophy of collective bargaining is by now standard. “The individual worker is weaker than the boss. What does the worker know about market conditions? Only the union knows that.” With collective bargaining, competition at the expense of the worker is eliminated and he is assured an increased share in the benefits of modem technology. “This,” Gordin says, “is good for everybody, because then the workers have enough purchasing power to buy back the things they produce.” The economics may be somewhat crude, but the argument is plausible.
“Unionization,” Gordin continues, “means higher wages and better working conditions. I know from bitter experience. Look, in 1910 the average wage in this industry was about 23 cents an hour. By 1928, in the Great Prosperity, they went up to about 75 cents an hour. True, in the depression we had to take a little cut, but by 1934 the wage rate on the average was back to 70 cents and today it is 96 cents an hour.” At this point Gordin becomes really eloquent. “The old-time rotten conditions are ended. Walk into the shops today and what do you find? Good lighting, good ventilation, enough space to move around, decent sanitation. And do you know why? Ninety per cent of all the shops in the United States are organized union shops!”
Gordin is proud of his union. Some years ago he met an important industrialist at a national labor-management conference. “Tell me,” asked Gordin, “how many people have you got in your organization?”
“Oh, about twelve thousand,” politely responded the industrial captain.
“Hmmph. I got over twenty thousand in my outfit,” said Gordin, triumphantly.
Two decades ago the Joint Board offices were located in a Sixth Avenue loft and the noise of the El provided a steady obbligato to the noise inside. Gordin could seldom be found at his desk; he was too busy patrolling the market. Today he is still seldom to be found at his desk, for “there isn’t enough to do here.” The Joint Board headquarters now occupy several stories of a large midtown office building and seem, with their tellers’ cages, more like a bank than a union office. And the manager’s room bears a striking resemblance to that of a bank president: the large oak desk, with its carafe, the leather-upholstered chairs and the group photographs on the walls contrast sharply with the two cubicles and mimeograph machine of thirty years ago.
Gordin’s office used to be cluttered with ancient and current copies of trade journals, magazines and newspapers. He used to believe that a man’s importance could be measured by the calculated disorder on his desk. In 1938 he visited Henry Wallace in Washington and observed that there were few papers on the latter’s desk. Gordin’s office has since been devoid of papers.
Gordin enjoys the respect that his union has so dearly won. He is now an accepted member of the community. His prestige is all the more glittering because of the contrast between his rebel’s background and his present mildly progressive political opinions. But you had better not accuse him of having surrendered his socialist faith. He insists that he has merely adapted socialism to the changing tides of history.
One of the benchmarks of that adaptation is Gordin’s activity in third party politics. This is a new field and it has meant even greater prestige. Conferences, caucuses, and mass meetings have broadened his understanding of American life. But Gordin’s participation in politics is only in direct proportion to the importance given to it by the General Office president. He prefers Jewish philanthropic enterprises; because, some cynics suggest, they provide greater opportunity for contact with people of importance. In any case, as a result of his charitable interests, Gordin’s consciousness of his Jewishness has been reawakened. He now frequents Jewish restaurants, particularly the Café Royal, where he exchanges friendly banter with Forward writers. He is not averse to publicity.
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Recently Gordin completed twenty-five years of service as Joint Board manager, and, as is customary, his little union coterie decided to “throw him a banquet.” It was one of the most elegant affairs in the union’s history. The General Office president paid a glowing two-hour tribute to the guest of honor, who beamed through his cigar at the twenty-dollar-a-plate manufacturers and smilingly acknowledged the greetings of his union brethren. After a glowing peroration the president ended, “And in appreciation of Dave’s great contribution to the union we present him with this thousand-dollar bond.” The audience applauded heartily and the manufacturers loudly clanked knives against plates.
Gordin arose to express his thanks. He put his cigar away and said, “I’m very happy to accept this token from the boys. Both Uncle Sam and I can make good use of it. We old-timers may seem a little slow now, but we got no regrets. If we had to do it over again we would. You know, middle-rank union people like me are after all not so important like the rank-and-file and the top leadership. But maybe we’ve made a little contribution to the union, and to America, and maybe we have a right to be a little proud of it.” David Gordin seemed just a bit tired as he sat down.