A Road to Peace and Freedom: An Interview with Robert Zecker
Robert Zecker is an associate professor of history at Saint Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. His teaching and research interests include immigration to the U.S., race and ethnicity, and urban history. His book, "A Road to Peace and Freedom": The International Workers Order and the Struggle for Economic Justice and Civil Rights, 1930-1954, published by Temple University Press in 2018, is the culmination of years of research and incorporates many resources found at The New York Public Library. All images within this post are from the Vito Marcantonio Papers, series III, boxes 45-47, from the NYPL Manuscripts and Archives Division.
For those not familiar, please briefly introduce the subject of your study, the International Workers Order.
Zecker: The International Workers Order (IWO) was a consortium of left-wing ethnic self-insurance societies that was born in 1930 in the "languages division" of the Communist Party USA. The Order envisioned its mission as more capacious than writing accident and death policies and, at its height, enlisted more than 188,000 black, white, Hispanic, and Arabic members. The IWO was a militant champion of interracial solidarity, black civil rights, strong industrial unions, and rigorous social security programs for working-class Americans.
I look at the activities the IWO pursued during the 1930s-1950s: why these activities landed them in trouble with the House Un-American Activities Committee and U.S. Justice Department; whether these activities really were a threat to U.S. security; and how the IWO defended itself against being labeled subversive.
Can you speak a bit about how you conducted your research, and what led you to NYPL’s archival holdings?
Zecker: As I was finishing a previous book, I started reading about left-wing ethnic organizations such as the IWO, that resisted embracing whiteness at the expense of African Americans. I then started diving into various archives to see where I could find the papers of such organizations, reading a lot of material that eventually didn’t find its way into the book!
At one point I did a lot of work at the New York Public Library looking at the issues of Labor Defender, which was the monthly magazine of the International Labor Defense, an organization that provided legal representation to union organizers and civil-rights activists.
Congressman Vito Marcantonio was president of the ILD, as well as a vice president of the International Workers Order. Marcantonio was a tireless defender of labor and civil rights, and I was delighted to discover that the Vito Marcantonio papers are held at the NYPL’s Manuscripts and Archives Division.
In looking through the organizational files in the Marcantonio papers here, I was surprised to see the names of so many prominent cultural figures on the letterheads—Rockwell Kent, for example.
Zecker: Rockwell Kent was the president of the IWO following World War II. Kent was a painter, printmaker, and prolific artist in other media. The IWO sponsored workers’ schools and various recreational activities for its members, such as painting classes, sports teams, theater troupes and choirs, and mandolin orchestras, so it’s not surprising to discover a prominent artist such as Kent in the IWO.
Marcantonio supported the IWO in its development of ethnic festivals and dance troupes, singing groups, etc., for its members. In his East Harlem congressional district, he often attended such IWO musical galas for Italian and "Spanish"—primarily Puerto Rican—members.
Kent was an artist, but also a progressive. When he ran for Congress from upstate New York on the Progressive Party line in 1948, he proudly noted he was a member of three unions. Kent also noted his all-American, colonial Massachusetts pedigree, perhaps to counter anti-Communists’ stigmatization of the IWO as "foreign" and "un-American."
Kent, as well as another prominent IWO member, African American actor-singer Paul Robeson, suffered for their activism and IWO membership. Both were denied passports by the State Department for eight years in the 1950s until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Kent’s case, it was unconstitutional to deny a citizen a passport because of his political beliefs.
Can you discuss further the IWO and how it was structured? How did Marcantonio work in tandem with the brotherhood in his role as a Congressman?
Zecker: The IWO was a consortium of ethnic societies that eventually grew to number fifteen language branches. Many of its members were immigrants, so lodges often conducted meetings in Yiddish, Italian, Slovak, Spanish, and other languages. The Order also, however, recruited African American workers from its beginning and eventually a Lincoln-Douglass Society was founded for African American members.
However, "English" lodges, for 2nd-generation white ethnics and other members, were established, too, and many such lodges had white and black members meeting in the same lodge. The Order had a national president and general secretary, but the language societies and the African American Lincoln-Douglass Society and "Spanish" Cervantes Society were granted a lot of autonomy.
When it was founded in 1930, the IWO brought together several pre-existing left-wing societies such as the Slovak Workers Society and the American Russian Fraternal Society. The IWO provided members with sickness, old-age, and death and burial insurance. At the time of its founding, there was no government program to aid the unemployed, aged, or destitute, so there was a real need.
But from its beginning the IWO saw its mission as lobbying for more systemic changes. Foreign-language newspapers ran calls for new members that stressed the Order’s lobbying the government on "the struggle for unemployment, accident, sick, and old age insurance and death benefit."
The IWO was fortunate to have an ally in Congress. Vito Marcantonio was the leader of the Order’s Garibaldi Society for Italian members, and worked in tandem with the Order lobbying for measures eventually enacted during the New Deal. The NYPL Marcantonio papers contain letters and petitions from IWO members urging him to demand more funding for Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects. Marcantonio was an advocate of universal health care, worker safety, and the extension of Social Security.
In 1944 the IWO embraced Franklin Roosevelt’s call for a guarantee of the Four Freedoms and an economic Bill of Rights for all Americans. Consequently, the Order published a pamphlet by Marcantonio, "Security with FDR," which called for the president’s re-election and the implementation of further social-democratic measures.
And although there were branches along ethnic lines, the IWO ultimately promoted multiculturalism.
Zecker: The IWO celebrated the ethnic heritage of Slavic, Italian, and Jewish members, and also lauded the contributions African Americans and Hispanics made to the nation. White members sponsored events during Black History Week, and Slovak, Hungarian and other "ethnic" lodges often socialized with black and Hispanic IWO members at festivals, sporting events, camp outings, and theater evenings.
Beyond advocating interracial socializing—itself anathema to many conservative Americans—the IWO campaigned for civil rights measures such as a federal anti-lynching bill, a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), integration of the armed forces, an end to Jim Crow segregation of public facilities, and protection of black voting rights. In all of these campaigns, the IWO had a vocal ally in Marcantonio, whose unfashionable—for 1930-40s America—advocacy of racial equality is amply documented in the NYPL’s Marcantonio papers.
The Baltimore Afro-American approvingly noted an IWO anti-discrimination rally and Marcantonio’s introduction of a bill barring discrimination in war work. Rubin Saltzman of the IWO’s Jewish section similarly demanded Army base recreational facilities be integrated.
Marcantonio also decried the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, for which he received letters of thanks from Nissei, including a letter from an internee that may have been dearest to his heart.
"I believe that I am expressing the innermost feelings of all the 110,000 evacuees (90% of whom are citizens) in saying that we are greatly heartened and encouraged in the knowledge that you have the vision and courage to look at fundamental issues realistically," George Yoshioka wrote from a camp in Amache, Colorado, "and that you have taken steps to correct an unjust condition that has existed for these many years."
Marcantonio proposed a bill to remove the bar on Asian naturalization, a move that earned him congratulations from the Japanese American Committee for Democracy. Letters in the NYPL Marcantonio papers, though, reveal that other white Americans did not appreciate Marcantonio and the IWO’s efforts. Letter-writers expressed fear of "race mixing" should the ban be lifted.
It seems like the IWO’s radicalism played out not only in political realms, but also in everyday life—such as the integration of baseball.
Zecker: The IWO afforded members a dizzying array of social activities; they created a kind of lived progressive milieu. Their own sports leagues were integrated, with black, white, and Hispanic baseball players competing in IWO leagues in places as varied as Los Angeles, Providence, Jersey City, and Canton, Ohio, as early as the 1930s. During these IWO games, petitions demanding the integration of the Major Leagues were passed through the stands. In other sporting events, fun, interracialism, and radical identity mixed, too. The African American Chicago Defender publicized these tournaments.
Both the IWO and Marcantonio would find themselves under government scrutiny in the post-war and 1950s.
Zecker: The IWO was often in the crosshairs of various anti-Communist investigators. The House Un-American Activities Committee raided the Order’s Philadelphia offices in 1940, a seizure denounced by Marcantonio and later overturned by a federal judge. Marcantonio’s activities, while left-progressive, seemed to be protected even though the FBI continued to keep tabs on the congressman during the 1930s and ‘40s.
Still, during World War II, "Marc" and his IWO comrades could laugh off the shenanigans of red-baiters such as HUAC Chairman Martin Dies. Marcantonio addressed the IWO’s 1944 convention in a speech frequently interrupted by "applause" and "laughter," predicting, "I hope that the day is not far off when I will not be the only member of Congress who is a member of the International Workers Order. In fact, I am confident… very soon there will be less Dieses, less Rankins, and more members of the IWO in the halls of Congress!"
After World War II, Marc’s confidence may have been shaken. The FBI had already in 1941 recommended that this sitting congressman be rounded up in the event the FBI deemed there to be a national emergency warranting the establishment of security concentration camps. When the McCarran-Walter Act of 1950 provided for the establishment of internal detention lists and security detention camps, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wanted Marcantonio placed on the list of those to be rounded up for detention. An assistant attorney general pointed out to Hoover that Marcantonio was still a sitting congressman.
Within days of losing his seat in November 1950, though, Marcantonio was added to the list of security detainees; one of the marks against him in the FBI’s internal security memo was his attendance at an anti-lynching rally.
Foreign-born IWO members were stripped of their citizenship and deported. Those IWO members who worked for government agencies—even the post office—were required to sign loyalty oaths. In 1951, the New York State Insurance Department used the IWO’s placement on the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations as a pretext to strip the Order of its insurance license, declaring the IWO to be a "hazard."
New York State’s Supreme Court affirmed the liquidation order three years later. When the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear its appeal, the International Workers Order was disbanded. The IWO, with its bands, choirs, and militant advocacy of workers’ rights and racial justice was done.
Also, in 1954, Vito Marcantonio, campaigning to reclaim his congressional seat, expired, succumbing to a heart attack on the campaign trail at age 52.
Many of the social welfare and rights issues addressed by the IWO are still issues at large today. What lessons does the rise and fall of the organization have for 21st century America?
Zecker: The IWO presents an example of an organization that resisted the dangerous call of
white privilege. The members seem to have recognized that stigmatizing blacks or immigrants as intruders into America, or as those unfairly "taking" jobs or social benefits from "real" Americans, was a zero-sum game that would ultimately depress the living standards and working condition of all Americans.
The common cause that white ethnics made with African Americans, Hispanics, and even Arab Americans may have been easier to envision in the 1930s and ‘40s than today, because even Slavic and Italian immigrants in that era were still often stigmatized as permanent outsiders. But the twinning of issues of racial justice and social-democratic economic advances by the IWO seems a timely reminder to avoid divide and conquer tactics or the dismissal of others’ causes. The IWO genuinely believed in interracialism, and even used the term "intersectionality" when referring to its activism on gender, racial and class issues, and this back in the 1930s.
Advocacy of universal health care in the late 1930s and 1940s by the IWO seems like an issue whose time has come once again. Also, the story of the IWO demonstrates the enormity of the hurdles the group, or any group in our own day, has to overcome when confronting the surveillance state and a militarized national security state. The FBI files on the IWO, and on Marcantonio, reveal a panopticon of official spying on advocates of racial justice and unionized workers’ rights. The voluminous files on Marcantonio, and on the IWO as an organization, were tabulated decades before WikiLeaks, but they demonstrate how the security state has always tried to contain and limit democratic dissent. This is an ominous lesson for the 21st century.
The anti-immigrant ethos behind much of the Red Scare of the 1940s and '50s, too, resonates with the current distressing official war on the foreign-born by ICE. It might be a lesson worth pondering by Slavic, Italian, and other white ethnic Americans that, 60 years ago, one’s own ancestors were characterized by officeholders and the media as the foreign menace polluting America.
More optimistically, the IWO did achieve gains that we now take for granted on economic rights as well as racial equality. Although IWO members were deported, and the organization liquidated, other IWO activists continued their work in the struggle for racial and class equality.
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Marcantonio’s career in the IWO and Congress is vividly recounted in letters, speeches, papers, and other documents held at the NYPL. In addition to textual documents, the Vito Marcantonio papers also include photographs and sound recordings. All photographs depict material from the subjects' correspondence and papers series, boxes 45-47. This collection is supplemented by NYPL's rich database resources, such as the Communist Historical Newspapers Collection and the U.S. Declassified Documents Online, both of which are available online with an NYPL library card.
