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WORK TITLE: Fighting for Total Person Unionism
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Bussel, Bob
BIRTHDATE: 1951
WEBSITE:
CITY: Eugene
STATE: OR
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://uonews.uoregon.edu/bob-bussel-labor-education-and-research-center * https://lerc.uoregon.edu/people/faculty/bob-bussel/ * http://blogs.uoregon.edu/lerc2/files/2017/03/Bussel-cv-1fyllyw.pdf
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1951.
EDUCATION:Rutgers University, master’s degree; Cornell University, Ph.D., 1993.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU), former assistant to senior executive vice president; Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, worked in labor education; University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, associate professor, 2002-15, professor of history, 2015—, director, Labor Education and Research Center, 2002—. Member of executive board, Oregon Labor and Employment Relations Association, 2015—.
WRITINGS
Also editor of University of Oregon report on the immigrant experience in Oregon, 2008. Contributor to books, including Youth Activism: An International Encyclopedia, edited by Lonnie R. Sherrod, Constance Flanagan, and Ron Kassimir, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 2006; Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-Class History, edited by Eric Arneson, Routledge (Hoboken, NJ), 2007; Life and Labor in the New New South: Essays in Southern Labor History since 1950, edited by Robert H. Zieger, University Press of Florida (Gainesville, FL), 2012; Oxford Encyclopedia of American Economic, Business, and Labor History, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2013; Contemporary Immigration in America: A State by State Encyclopedia, two volumes, edited by Kathleen R. Arnold, Greenwood/ABC-Clio (Santa Barbara, CA), 2015; and American National Biography Online, edited by Susan Ware, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2016.
SIDELIGHTS
University of Oregon professor of history Robert Bussel specializes in labor history. He was a union executive in a clothing manufacturing union before joining academic life. Since then, said the contributor of a biographical blurb appearing on the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center Web site, “Bussel has become deeply interested in issues affecting immigrant workers from both a research and an activist perspective.” His works include the monographs From Harvard to the Ranks of Labor: Powers Hapgood and the American Working Class and Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship.
From Harvard to the Ranks of Labor traces the career of a little-known American labor activist. “Born in 1899,” wrote Craig Phelan in the American Historical Review, “Powers Hapgood was an only child, the son of Progressive, upper-class parents in Indianapolis. With a maid to prepare his meals and a private tutor to help him with his studies, Hapgood was far removed from working-class reality. Yet, like many of his contemporaries, Hapgood was also an idealist. He pondered the plight of working people while at Harvard University.” He went on to become instrumental in the work of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). “Hapgood was in the thick of many great victories. As an influential emissary of [CIO leader John L.] Lewis, he advised rubber and auto industry sit-down strikers in Akron and Flint and helped the United Electrical Workers win a key union-building fight at RCA in Camden, New Jersey,” explained Steve Early in the Nation. “Bussel’s biography also sheds light on Hapgood’s role in several less successful—but no less interesting—ventures while he directed the CIO’s Shoe Workers Organizing Committee.”
Fighting for Total Person Unionism explores the ways Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway, two Teamsters union leaders, fought to incorporate reforms and cultivate union activism throughout the lives of their membership. Bussel establishes, according to Andrew E. Kersten in the American Historical Review, “that their advocacy for working-class citizenship and ‘total person unionism’ not only resulted in significant social, political, and economic advances but also created a framework for unions that has endured beyond Gibbons’s and Calloway’s ten-year period of influence in St. Louis, Missouri, and the nation. Together they sought to link the shop floor with the living room floor in an attempt ‘to create a community bargaining table where empowered worker-citizens negotiated with St. Louis’s economic and political elites to ensure an equitable distribution of social resources.’” They also pointed the union toward fighting racism (Gibbons was white and Calloway was black) and arguing for democracy both on and outside the shop floor. “The book,” asserted Max Krochmal in the Journal of Southern History, “is a captivating must-read for historians of postwar labor and civil rights movements as well as for present-day union officials and community organizers. … Bussel’s account of Gibbons and Calloway’s joint effort to transform workers into citizens to bring labor power to the community bargaining table proves engaging, broadly relevant, and extremely timely.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Historical Review, December, 2000, Craig Phelan, review of From Harvard to the Ranks of Labor: Powers Hapgood and the American Working Class, p. 1759; October, 2016, Andrew E. Kersten, review of Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship, p. 1313.
Journal of Southern History, February, 2017, Max Krochmal, review of Fighting for Total Person Unionism, p. 227.
Nation, March 20, 2000, Steve Early, “From Crimson to Coal Seam,” p. 48.
ONLINE
University of Oregon, Labor Education and Research Center Web site, https://lerc.uoregon.edu/ (July 26, 2017), author profile.
University of Oregon, Media Relations Web site, https://uonews.uoregon.edu/ (July 26, 2017), author profile.
UO Blogs, http://blogs.uoregon.edu/ (July 26, 2017), author profile.*
MICHAEL ROBERT“BOB” BUSSEL, Ph.D.Labor Education and Research Center1289 University of OregonEugene, Oregon 97403TELEPHONE (W) 541 346-2784 (CELL) 541 743-1403EMAIL-bussel@uoregon.eduEDUCATION1993 Ph.D. (American History) Cornell UniversityWORK EXPERIENCE2015Professor of History and Director, Labor Education and Research Center,University of OregonResponsible for overseeing and directing Labor Education and Research Center. Also teach classes in University of Oregon history department on a biennial basis.2002Associate Professor of History and Director, Labor Education and Research Center, University of Oregon.Responsible for overseeing and directing Labor Education and Research Center, including administering budget, managing faculty and staff, developing curriculum, consulting with labor, political, and community organizations, teaching, and overall coordination of labor education functions. Also teach classes in University of Oregon history department on a biennial basis.PUBLICATIONS: BOOKS , CHAPTERS, AND PIECESIN EDITED VOLUMES“Ernest Calloway,” American National Biography Online,Susan Ware, editor, Oxford University Press, 2016.Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship, Universityof Illinois Press, October 2015."Oregon," Kathleen R. Arnold (editor), in Contemporary Immigration in America: A State by State Encyclopedia(2 vols.), Greenwood/ABC-Clio, January 2015.
“Richard L. Trumka,”inOxford Encyclopedia of American Economic, Business, and Labor History, Oxford University Press, 2013.“Worker-Citizens at the Community Bargaining Table: The Community Stewards Program of the St. Louis Teamsters in the 1950s,”in Robert H. Zieger (editor), Life and Labor in the New New South:Essays in Southern Labor History since 1950, University Press of Florida, 2012.“Powers Hapgood,” “The Delmarva Poultry Justice Alliance,” and “The United Food and Commercial Workers,” inEric Arneson (editor), Encyclopedia of U. S. Labor and Working-Class History, Routledge /Taylor & Francis, 2007.“Youth and the Labor Movement: Volume 2,” in Lonnie R. Sherrod, (Editor), Constance Flanagan and Ron Kassimir(Associate Editors), Greenwood Publishing Company, Youth Activism: An International Encyclopedia, 2006.From Harvard to the Ranks of Labor: Powers Hapgood and the American Working Class, Penn State University Press, November 1999.REPORTSEditor and Contributor, “Understanding the Immigrant Experience in Oregon: Research, Analysis, and Recommendations from University of Oregon Scholars,” May 2008.“BOLI: One Hundred Years of Service to Working Oregonians,” study commissioned by Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, available on BOLI web site,www.oregon.gov/boli/, Winter 2007.HONORS, AWARDS, AND GRANTS2016Grant from Kaiser Permanente to help fund “The Quiet Revolution: The Transformation of Home Health Care in Oregon2014Archie Green Fellowship, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, $33,000, for research on occupational folklore among home health care workers.2013Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, $10,000 to develop strategic assessment tool.2012California Teachers Association, $225,000 to facilitate comprehensive strategic planning process.2010Veteran/Elder Labor Day Award, Lane County Labor Council, September 6, 2010.
2010Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, University of Oregon, $1,328 toconduct interviews in support of immigration community conversation.2010Oregon Council for the Humanities, $2,100 for coordinating a community conversation on immigration in Lane County, Oregon.2008Oregon Community Foundation, $25,000 for production and dissemination of “The Immigrant Experience in Oregon.”2006 Sociological Initiatives Foundation, $15,000 grant shared with Eugene-Springfield Solidarity Network to conduct focus groups in connection with Mayor’s Sustainable Business Initiatives Task Force.2003Best Paper Award, Labor Studies Journal, for “Taking on Big Chicken: The Delmarva Poultry Justice Alliance,” 2003.PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITYConsultant and proposal reviewer, Oregon Historical Quarterly “Migration Symposium,” November 2016.Manuscript reviewer, University of Illinois Press, 2015.Executive Board Member, Oregon Labor and Employment Relations Association 2015-present.Contributing Editor: Labor: Studies in the History of the Americas, 2015-present.Executive Board Member, Labor and Working-Class History Association, 2013-2016.Executive Board Member and University Labor Educators Representative, United Association of Labor Educators, 2010-2014.
BOB BUSSEL
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DIRECTOR, PROFESSOR
bbusselSince 2002, Bob Bussel has been associate professor of history and director of the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon. Previously, Bussel was a labor educator at Penn State University for seven years.
Before entering the university labor education field, Bussel worked for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. He was assistant to the senior executive vice-president of ACTWU, coordinated the J.P. Stevens boycott in New Jersey, and directed organizing campaigns in the Mid-Atlantic States.
Bussel holds a masters degree in labor education from Rutgers University and a Ph.D. in history from Cornell University. His first book, From Harvard to the Ranks of Labor: Powers Hapgood and the American Working Class, was published in 1999. He recently completed a second book titled Creating Working-Class Citizens: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and the Quest for Total Person Unionism.
Bussel has published numerous articles on labor history and contemporary labor issues. He also conducts applied research on work and employment issues, including co-authorship of three studies on the privatization of school support services in Oregon.
As a labor educator, Bussel has conducted trainings and workshops in the areas of strategic planning, leadership development, internal organizing, labor-management participation, and message framing.
In recent years Bussel has become deeply interested in issues affecting immigrant workers from both a research and an activist perspective. He edited a 2008 University of Oregon report on the immigrant experience in Oregon and in 2010, convened the Integration Network for Immigrants in Lane County, a group that seeks to create more welcoming communities for immigrants and their families. He is also currently working on a film documenting the history of home care workers in Oregon.
See Curriculum Vitae for publications and activities
Phone: 541.346.2784
Email: bussel@uoregon.edu
Bob Bussel, Labor Education and Research Center
Bob Bussell, Director of the Labor Education Research Center and Associate Professor of History
Bob Bussel
bussel@uoregon.edu
Academic Areas: Labor Unions, Income Inequality, Immigration, Work, Working Families
Bob Bussel is an expert in labor unions and related politics, especially income inequality, immigrant workers, and topics related to paid sick leave, the work-family divide, labor standards, and labor relations. At the University of Oregon, he is a professor of history and director of the Labor Education and Research Center. Some of his more recent work takes a comprehensive look at the history of immigration of Oregon. Bob also teaches a sports history class. His book, "Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship," is scheduled for release in fall 2015.
Contact:
bussel@uoregon.edu | 541-346-2784
Websites:
http://lerc.uoregon.edu/about/faculty/bob-bussel/
Recent Media:
Oregon and migration, constant companions (Jefferson Public Radio, Nov. 15, 2016)
Few problems so far with new sick-leave law (The Bulletin, Jan. 15, 2016)
How did 2 Teamsters leaders shape St. Louis with ‘total persons’ movement? (St. Louis Public Radio, Dec. 21, 2015)
How Bend businesses become best places to work (The Bulletin, Dec. 6, 2015)
Labor’s rank and file still believe in collective bargaining’s power to bolster middle class (The Conversation, Nov. 6, 2015)
Rebirth of progressivism may breathe new life in labor unions (The Conversation, April 17, 2015)
University of Oregon labor historian sees drawbacks, benefits in Obama’s immigration plans (The Oregonian, Dec. 24, 2014)
From Crimson to Coal Seam
Steve Early
The Nation. 270.11 (Mar. 20, 2000): p48.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 The Nation Company L.P.
http://www.thenation.com/about-and-contact
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FROM HARVARD TO THE RANKS OF LABOR: Powers Hapgood and the American Working Class. By Robert Bussel. Penn State. 257 pp. $57.50. Paper $19.95.
I first heard about Powers Hapgood while working at the United Mine Workers, an organization he had tried to change fifty years earlier. The "Save the Union" movement, which Hapgood, along with other left- wingers, aided in 1926, failed to topple then-UMW president John L. Lewis. But in the early seventies rank-and-filers campaigning under the banner of "Miners for Democracy" defeated a Lewis successor-the even more despotic W.A. "Tony" Boyle.
Backing this new UMW reform effort was an energetic group of college- educated "outsiders" who, like Hapgood, were drawn to the miners' struggle because of its potential for triggering a broader transformation of organized labor and coal-field communities. The more radical among them took jobs in the mines, as did Hapgood, despite his Harvard pedigree. Others were propelled by the MFD victory directly into UMW staff positions, where union politics was also a severe-if less physically demanding-test for even the most committed idealist.
In the seventies, as in the twenties, almost every UMW battle with the coal operators had an internecine aspect. Loyalists to Boyle quickly regrouped and tried to undermine the new MFD leaders. The latter fell out among themselves, adding to the factionalism, infighting and redbaiting. A growing wildcat-strike movement in the coal fields-over unresolved workplace problems-put the reformers in the uncomfortable position of trying to curb the militancy of members frustrated with the pace of change. Despite the MFD's success in democratizing the union, many of the hopes and expectations it initially aroused were never fulfilled. A decade after the group's election win, almost none of the progressives associated with it-either as "colonizers" in the mines or appointed staffers-were still active in the UMW (although some went on to other unions).
It's too bad that Robert Bussel's excellent new biography of Powers Hapgood wasn't available sooner to help put their experience in historical perspective. A former trade unionist now employed as a labor educator, Bussel's has both an academic's ability to scour the archives and an activist's feel for the real-life context of his subject. His book traces Hapgood's personal and political odyssey from a privileged WASP family to the coal mines of western Pennsylvania and then active engagement in some of the most high-profile labor struggles of the twenties, thirties and forties. A peripatetic organizer and frequent Nation contributor, Hapgood had a Zelig-like ability to be at or near the center of the action-whether in the UMW, the Sacco and Vanzetti defense, Socialist Party campaigns, Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) sit-downs, New Deal labor politics or postwar conflict over reds and racism within unions.
Throughout it all, he was an unusually perceptive and self-critical participant/observer. His private journals represent, in Bussel's view, "a rich chronicle of the American working class, the labor movement, and the practice of radical politics." Heavily mined by the author, these diaries record Hapgood's "interactions with intellectuals, workers, labor leaders, and managers as he attempted to make sense of his experience and adapt to the changing cultural and political circumstances that occurred during his career."
Hapgood's career reflected many of the same hopes and frustrations experienced by other labor leftists, before and since. He continually chafed at the institutional constraints imposed on him by a union movement whose economic and political agenda was far more limited than his own. Yet, during his various stints as a "freelance agitator," Hapgood often felt marginalized and ineffective-cut off from the resources, legitimacy and popular base that only mass organizations can provide. His biggest compromise came in the mid-thirties, when he reconciled with Lewis, his onetime archenemy in the UMW. This permitted him to play an active role in the great organizing upsurge that built the CIO. However, within a few short years, "he found himself squeezed between the militancy of the workers, the demands of the wartime state, and the CIO leadership's increasing hesitation to offend the Roosevelt Administration."
Hapgood was, in short, someone who never stopped trying to reconcile the demands of his own conscience with the sometimes conflicting dictates of organizational policy and the day-to-day pressures of trade-union work. While rooted in a particular era, his story is nevertheless relevant, as Bussel points out, to "succeeding generations of intellectuals...who have looked to the working class and the labor movement...[for] political fulfillment"-only to be "inspired and confounded." From Harvard to the Ranks of Labor should be required reading for the Ivy Leaguers (and other recent college graduates) now being hired as organizers by John Sweeney's AFL-CIO. It might also stimulate some useful reflection among former sixties radicals who have, from their impressive new perches in the labor bureaucracy, promoted student recruitment.
When he finished Harvard in 1920 (he had prepped at Andover), Hapgood was an unlikely convert to union activism. He hadn't been a student radical or a critic of his generation's imperialist war. His father was a boss, president of Columbia Conserve Company, an Indiana cannery widely hailed for its worker-ownership plan. Not surprisingly, Hapgood's background made him far more sympathetic toward Progressive Era experiments in labor-management cooperation than working-class struggle.
His views began to change during a postgraduate tour of the West. There he met Wobblies, worked in a Montana mine and joined the UMW. His initial stint underground led to a job researching hazardous conditions in the Pennsylvania coal fields, where he formed a lifelong friendship with John Brophy, a UMW district official who became his most influential mentor. Sixteen years Hapgood's senior, Brophy was a class- conscious, self-educated immigrant from Britain who cultivated ties with urban intellectuals and rallied the rank and file around demands for nationalization of the mines and democratization of the national union. His nemesis was John L. Lewis.
In his twenties incarnation, the UMW president was autocratic, conservative and very reluctant to confront the open-shop trend among the nation's coal operators. Brophy, on the other hand, took a hard- line approach in the industrywide walkout by more than 500,000 miners in 1922. This sixteen-month struggle provided Hapgood with his first and most formative strike experience. Sent by Brophy to Somerset County, Pennsylvania-a hotbed of UMW activity-Hapgood helped workers and their families resist injunctions, jailings, brutal evictions and baton charges by the "coal and iron police." Because of these sacrifices (and Hapgood's impassioned PR work in liberal journals), the coal miner, says Bussel, "achieved iconographic status, both as a symbol of an oppressed working class and as an agent capable of reforming an unjust economic system."
A "ruthless pragmatist," Lewis was not yet ready to buck that system. So he ended the dispute with a settlement that failed to extend the union's national contract to the nonunion miners who had joined the strike. Brophy, Hapgood and other militants denounced this as a betrayal-and launched the "Save the Union" movement as a platform for Brophy's run against Lewis for the union presidency. Lewis had a formidable political machine that counted votes as deftly as it cut deals with employers. Marred by fraud and intimidation, the election ended in bitter defeat for the insurgents. Hapgood in particular was demonized as a radical disrupter and a tool of the Communist Party (to which he did not belong). Both he and Brophy were driven out of the UMW and forced, at one point, to seek work at the "model company" run by Hapgood's father.
Hapgood then spent several years at loose ends. He took up Socialist Party work, aided the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, campaigned for civil liberties and workers' rights, and tried unsuccessfully to get back into mining (from which he had been blacklisted by labor and management). As a "lone wolf crying in the wilderness," he reached the low point of his career just as, ironically, the Depression, revived labor militancy and the election of Franklin Roosevelt created the conditions for successful mass organizing of industrial workers.
This sea change passed others by in the American Federation of Labor, but not John L. Lewis. He first used FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act to rebuild the UMW. Then, in 1935, fearing that a historic opportunity was being squandered, he broke with labor's old guard over the role of his newly formed Committee of Industrial Organizations (predecessor to the Congress). Lewis also knew that the CIO needed experienced organizers, including CP members and former dissidents in his own union like Brophy, Hapgood and Adolph Germer. ("Who gets the bird, the hunter or the dog?" he explained privately when asked why he was hiring such people.) Hapgood and many other former Lewis critics responded to the CIO's call for obvious reasons of their own: "Industrial unionism with its rallying message of inclusiveness, popular participation, and working-class power represented the kernels of a larger program that might yet be directed toward social transformation."
During the next few years, Hapgood was in the thick of many great victories. As an influential emissary of Lewis, he advised rubber and auto industry sit-down strikers in Akron and Flint and helped the United Electrical Workers win a key union-building fight at RCA in Camden, New Jersey. Bussel's biography also sheds light on Hapgood's role in several less successful-but no less interesting-ventures while he directed the CIO's Shoe Workers Organizing Committee. For anyone who thinks that the thirties were all about labor's "giant step," it's instructive to read the book's detailed account of how a spirited strike by thousands of French-Canadian shoe workers in Maine was crushed by the combined efforts of management, local government, a hostile press and the reactionary Catholic Church.
Hapgood was most in his element in strike situations, preferably ones that recalled his glory days among the miners in Somerset County. However, as Bussel observes, winning union recognition during the New Deal often involved "a delicate balancing act: ensuring that militancy did not degenerate into violence, staving off police intervention, attempting to maintain public sympathy, and defining union objectives in limited terms" to establish the organizational basis for future gains. The onetime union dissident "soon discovered the difficulty of reconciling his commitment to working-class mobilization with the complex demands of union leadership." According to the author, "the bureaucratic and managerial overtones of his new role distressed Hapgood. He feared that he was beginning to manipulate rather than mobilize workers, contradicting the democratic commitments that defined his political identity."
Along with other radicals who were CIO functionaries, Hapgood came under pressure to keep his politics private. Sympathetic to Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas, Hapgood had little ability to promote SP critiques of the New Deal. ("We are all working for CIO unions but is our work helping socialism or not?" he wondered with good reason.) In the early forties-after being rejected for military service as a security risk-Hapgood was appointed CIO regional director in his home state of Indiana. There he helped organize black workers in the service sector and tried to find "alternatives to what he regarded as the pallid world of mature labor relations"-the "dense, legalistic system of industrial relations that was being cemented during World War II [which] threatened to erode the participatory activist orientation of the early industrial union movement."
Hapgood ended his career in tragic circumstances-alcoholic, unhappy, worn down by years of frenetic travel and high-pressure assignments. Nevertheless, he spent his final years resisting the creeping conservatism of postwar American unionism. He was an outspoken critic of discriminatory racial practices within labor-a stance that risked his local popularity. He also courageously resisted the CIO's first moves toward its eventual purge of left-led unions, fearing that "a new red scare would discredit all forces on the left, non-Communist and Communist alike, resulting in political sterility and conformism." Heavily redbaited himself-just as he had been in the twenties-he was forced out of his CIO post in 1948. Less than a year later, he was dead of a heart attack at 49.
Thanks to Bussel's skillful excavation and examination of Hapgood's life, his story didn't end there. It's now available for a new generation of labor activists to read and learn from. For any among them still struggling to reconcile loyalties to democratic socialist ideals and trade unionism, this book offers no simple answers or solutions. But it does suggest the need to find a middle way between selling out and dying so sadly.
Steve Early has worked for the United Mine Workers, the Teamsters and the Communications Workers during his twenty-seven years as a union activist.
Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship
Max Krochmal
Journal of Southern History. 83.1 (Feb. 2017): p227.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
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Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship. By Robert Bussel. The Working Class in American History. (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 244. Paper, $32.00, ISBN 978-0-252-08104-0; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03949-2.)
In Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship, Robert Bussel uses a joint biography of two union leaders to explore the role of organized labor in the larger communities that surround them. The two protagonists, one white, one black, both hailed from working-class families in coal country, and both wound their ways through the non-communist Left of the 1930s and 1940s before landing together in Teamsters Local 688 in St. Louis. Bussel follows the two organizers as they dug in deep in their adopted local union and city, the white Harold Gibbons as the organization's head and the black Ernest Calloway as his right-hand man. Together, the two nonsectarian socialists developed the concept of "total person unionism," which held that gaining power at the workplace through collective bargaining was not sufficient to protect the interests of ordinary working people (p. 5). Gibbons and Calloway instead sought to engage workers when they were away from the factories, warehouses, retailers, and taxi and transportation firms that employed them. Doing so would allow the Teamsters to build power and bargain collectively in the community writ large, not just in electoral politics but also in a broad range of local decision-making arenas. In the process, the union would protect its members and the larger working class and, more important, transform ordinary workers trained in deference to managerial and political elites into full-fledged citizens.
The duo proved remarkably successful in reaching this broad, democratic vision. In 1957, Bussel contends, the union led the charge in defeating a proposed amendment to the city charter that would have shielded downtown developers and their political allies from the messiness of participatory, ward-based politics. The Teamsters achieved victory in partnership with the local branch of the NAACP, of which Calloway was also a frequent officer. Indeed, fighting racism represented an integral part of Gibbons's vision of total person unionism. As union chief, Gibbons pushed white rank-and-file members to understand the importance of creating a democracy that included all people. Throughout the 1960s this egalitarian stance translated into a series of largely successful local campaigns.
Yet Bussel cautions that the duo's success in modeling total person unionism ultimately fell short. Technological innovation undermined Teamster jobs, while white flight undermined their vision of community organizing. More important, Gibbons became embroiled in the national Teamsters union's corruption scandals and then faced a counterinsurgency among members in Local 688 who claimed that his desire to build community and electoral power came at the expense of concerns on the shop floor. Gibbons's disavowal of the Vietnam War only added fuel to the fire, ending in his removal from the union's presidency. Meanwhile, Calloway increasingly lost traction in the city's civil rights movement after a series of ideological, tactical, and generational conflicts with dissident members of the NAACP and of the Congress of Racial Equality. Bussel connects the two activists' demise by arguing that both suffered when they strayed too far from the democratic principles that had animated their earlier organizing efforts. They lost touch with their respective members, dooming their more innovative campaigns and eventually their own leadership careers.
Overall the book is a captivating must-read for historians of postwar labor and civil rights movements as well as for present-day union officials and community organizers. My only quibble is that I would have liked more sustained engagement with the recent, well-regarded books on urban and civil rights history in St. Louis by historians Colin Gordon and Clarence Lang, both of which focus closely on labor, the working class, race, and politics in the very same communities. While Bussel ably recovers Gibbons and Calloway from obscurity and demonstrates that the union was anything but the bureaucratic and self-satisfied caricature of labor in the period, the tale's broader implications for postwar American history writ large remain underexamined. Still, Bussel's account of Gibbons and Calloway's joint effort to transform workers into citizens to bring labor power to the community bargaining table proves engaging, broadly relevant, and extremely timely--especially in the wake of the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, that demonstrated just how much of their vision remains to be fulfilled.
Max Krochmal
Texas Christian University