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Not for Bread Alone: A Memoir
By
Moe Foner
Cornell University Press, 2002
One beauty of a memoir is
its synthesis of disconnected, parallel histories into a single narrative of an
individual. Moe Foner’s
Not
for Bread Alone: A Memoir tells multiple stories. Foner imparts
expertise from his forty-year career as a labor public relations specialist,
and explores his founding of Bread and Roses, “labor’s foremost arts
program.” Not technically a history, Not
for Bread Alone contributes invaluable perspectives on the New
York post-war labor scene, on organizing public
sector and service employees, and on one strand of the Popular Front. Not for Bread Alone could even be
read as a communist inflected Horatio Alger story. Foner and his siblings, raised to “move up
the ladder,” all did so by championing America’s
least powerful. His older twin brothers,
Philip and Jack, became noted authors on the left, and his younger brother
Henry went on to head the Furriers Union.
Those looking for inspiration in the life of
this “gallant, passionate scrapper”—Studs Terkel’s
words—will find it. Those seeking an analytic or introspective exploration
might be disappointed. Foner fully chronicles certain campaigns, for example
1199’s early forays into the hospital industry.
More often he sketches the outlines of activities, sacrificing a deeper
examination of his convictions and the unlikely places they took him. Foner’s 991-page
oral history is recommended for greater detail, but in this book former 1199
News editor Dan North has captured Foner’s
voice and essential narrative.[1]
Foner
shows how ethnic culture, commercial entertainment, and mass culture shaped his
early life, and once digested, fed his activism. He jests that the Brooklyn
neighborhood where he was raised in the 1910s and 1920s was so Jewish that
outsiders were feared to have “horns.” Foner’s father attended an Eastern European verein, his
grandfather read the Yiddish Forward. Mom switched on the radio for opera and the “Goldbergs.” Foner watched the Dodgers, memorized song-sheet lyrics, and
hung out at Coney Island. Foner broke this
youthful “cocoon” when his brothers launched him into the worlds of Jewish
entertainment and the communist left. Foner helped amuse “Jewish New York” in the Catskills as
tenor sax in his brothers’ swing band. By twenty, Foner
had performed with Leadbelly, Zero Mostel, and Louis Prima; and as social director of the
Arrowhead Lodge, he picked up the networking skills so central to his cultural
activism. In the political ferment of
the 1930s Foner joined the Young Communist League
with “the smartest and the best people.”
New York City’s 1940 Rapp-Coudert hearings, a “local warm-up” of McCarthy’s HUAC,
resulted in the firing of all three brothers from City
College. With aplomb, they renamed their band
“Suspended Swing.”
A Catskills connection got Foner his first union job, he then moved to District 65
United Wholesale and Warehouse Workers Union.
There he “absorbed” from its president, the “organizational genius”
Arthur Osman, how to integrate cultural programming such as a penthouse
nightclub or children’s sing-alongs into a perpetual
organizing machine. When Osman forced
Foner out over signing of the Taft-Hartley non-communist affidavits, Leon
Davis, 1199 Retail Drug Employees Union’s president, nabbed him as
publicist.
Foner
is the only labor publicist to have won the American Public Relations
Association’s Silver Anvil award. He
deserved it, following many of the field’s tenets as articulated by PR pioneer,
Edward Bernays.
Foner won the award for his PR tactics in
1199’s first hospital campaign at Bronx’s Montefiore in 1958.
He excelled at developing catch phrases that crystallized the union’s
struggle, such as the city’s “forgotten men and women,” which moved New Yorkers
to empathize with Montefiore workers. Foner also
persuaded key “opinion molders,” Bernays’s phrase, to
come out in the workers’ favor. Foner put the heat on
hospital trustees by getting community newspapers El Diario
and Amsterdam
News to embrace the workers’ struggle as la crusada.
National opinion molders such as Eleanor Roosevelt and the New
York Times editorial staff joined them in more modulated tones. In the union’s 1959 multi-hospital campaign,
he drew in union leader A. Philip Randolph, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, psychologist Kenneth Clark, and civil rights
leaders Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin.
Foner
rarely controlled events but he managed strikes to the union’s advantage,
echoing Bernays’s call for “engineers of consent” to
“create news.” 1199’s first national
campaign, run in conjunction with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
was in Charleston, South Carolina. Foner made
effective use of Ralph Abernathy’s jail-house “milk and smuggled gin” hunger
strike, and the managers’ intransigent racism which included awarding workers
time off—on Robert E. Lee’s birthday. Celebrity support garnered Foner press attention in metropolitan dailies
nationwide. Charleston
became a tinderbox, with a boycott of main street businesses, marches, curfews,
mass arrests, and the National Guard. The union capitalized on this turmoil to
demand local and federal government intervention.
Not all these drives
succeeded. In Charleston
workers got managerial concessions but no union. Foner however,
believes that “every hospital administrator and trustee in the country had seen
the marchers in Charleston night
after night on their television screens.” Managers were more apt to capitulate
when workers organized new 1199s. Foner surely helped 1199 grow from some five thousand,
mostly Jewish pharmacy employees to a 200,000 member organization of mostly
black and Latina women, hospital
and home care workers.
Foner
collapses his last years at 1199 into a discussion of the “busted stradivarius” that 1199 became after Leon Davis stepped
down in 1981. Riven
by the “bitter elements of racism, sexism, red baiting, violence and
corruption,” 1199 split into two: a newly chartered national and the local
under RWDSU’s umbrella. Foner doesn’t probe
too deeply into what went wrong, but does give an inside account of the
campaign to wrest control of 1199 from Davis’s hand-picked successor, former
dietary clerk Doris Turner. 1199, a
beacon of progressive unionism, could not fully embody its ideals, even
internally. It generated unusual levels
of member involvement, but little independence.
The union’s vaunted internal democracy depended on a delegate system
that impeded discussion by bringing too many members together. Davis’s
centralized control was deeply flawed from the perspective of long-term
stability. This centralization was at
odds with the union’s commitments to equity, for it left women,
African-Americans, and Latinos with little decision-making power. [2]
Foner’s reticence on
these complexities points to a frustration with Not for Bread Alone. He cautions that his is a memoir of “what I
did and what I saw,” but one is left wishing Foner
shared more of what he thought of what he did and saw. What was the internal process by which he
and his cohorts dedicated their lives to working people, became enchanted by
the party, and then disenchanted? How
did the Cold War constrict the paths they took?
What was it like to work so closely with America’s
foremost civil rights leaders, Washington’s
elite, or Hollywood celebrities? These questions concern racism, social
mobility, oppositional politics, state repression, and an image-driven mass
culture, and they lie at the heart of the twentieth century’s contradictory
history. Foner’s
life is interesting because he engaged intimately with these questions, but his
circumspection flattens the narrative’s potential richness.
Perhaps Foner’s
biggest PR accomplishment was wedding culture with unionism by founding Bread
and Roses in 1978. “Being known as the
Bread and Roses union is so powerful, so sweet and non-threatening,” that it
enhanced 1199’s public image, said Foner. The organization’s name evokes the 1912 Lawrence
strike where immigrant women carried a banner demanding bread, but roses too.
“Roses” suggests culture in some undifferentiated sense, matching Foner’s
instrumental and aspirational conceptions of cultural
activism. He embraced the Popular Front
notion of culture as “a weapon…to build a better world.”[3] Simultaneously, Foner
was “determined to show…we could give our workers the best culture has to
offer” harking back to socialist visions of “high culture.” “The best culture has to offer” came with a
“middle-brow” or celebrity twist. Seeing
Harry Belafonte at Lincoln Center,
or having Jane Fonda, or long-time Bread and Roses champions Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee perform for members at union
headquarters, grants workers cultural capital otherwise denied them. It also ties workers more tightly to their union. Bread and Roses has also involved members as
cultural producers, but Foner claimed not to want to
“settle for another amateur night.” Perhaps as a consequence, he tells us less
about these activities.
It’s worth considering how Foner, arguably one of labor’s most important cultural
activists, made culture work. In the
“Images of Labor” series Foner realized two of his
pragmatic suggestions to cultural activists—get the best and stay out of their
way. Among the recognized artists he
involved: Jacob Lawrence, known for the colorful, geometric figures who people
his Great Migration series; Alice Neel, who limns her sitters’ inner lives in
bold, graphic portraits; Sue Coe, a “visual journalist” whose dark, violent
canvases and etchings grapple with AIDS, war, and the meat industry; and
mixed-media artist May Stevens who criticizes authority by evoking memory and
loss. Each artist had strong political
commitments. Lawrence
treated the African-American experience; Neel had
Communist Party connections, and painted labor figures such as Mike Gold but
also celebrities like Andy Warhol.
Stevens’s work is grounded in feminism, while Coe has been most recently
dedicated to animal rights. Each artist
visually interpreted a quote from a labor martyr, activist or American cultural
figure. Sojourner Truth’s “and ain’t I a
woman” joins a 1937 sit-downer who realized his consciousness drives the
machine, while Mark Twain celebrates “they that make the bread that the soft handed
and idle eat.”
Foner pulled these
artists and their audiences into a hundred-year conversation about labor and
its concerns. He then expanded the
audience: half a million people saw the exhibition, eighty thousand bought a
book, and sixty-five thousand poster sets were sold. Foner fused high
art with mass production; he recuperated workers’ history to imagine a new
community of labor solidarity that spoke to workers and the broader public.
Ironically, a Container Corporation of America
ad campaign that joined its corporate logo to an artwork and the appropriated
words of public figures like Thomas Jefferson inspired Foner. When corporations assemble these free
floating signifiers it’s good business. Think Container Corporation, think
democracy. Foner
believed labor could do the same.
Not all projects were so
grand, but at its best, Bread and Roses’s programming
confounds the rigid analytic frameworks employed by analysts of unions,
workers, and culture. Social critics
often imagine a labor’s “top 40” that fits preconceived notions of the
ideologically correct: the muscled arm with hammer of the 19th
century, or union theatre such as “Pins and Needles.” This nostalgic elegy
calls on the same cast of characters who become ever more dessicated
and brittle over time.[4] Or, we see a monolithic, mass culture that
saturates workers lives: McDonalds for lunch, Walmart
on the weekends, evenings parked in front of the TV. This focus blinds us to the persistence of
alternative cultures that workers engage in: whether it is chainsaw carving,
low-riding, religion, or ethnic and associational life. A more recent trend is finding resistance and
opposition in mass culture and other cultural forms that involve workers. This conceptualization breaks the narrowness
of earlier frameworks, but tends to be overly celebratory. Foner certainly
took advantage of early labor icons, wasn’t too interested in workers’
creativity, and did not doubt the influence of mass culture. But with Bread and Roses he showed how a bit
of tinkering could renew labor’s cultural past, enhance workers loyalty to the
union, even alter their relationship to the culture surrounding them.
In the interviews that
formed the basis of Not For Bread Alone, Foner resisted
being pinned down on any grand conceptualization of culture for or by
workers. This is in keeping with his
strengths. Like all great PR specialists and organizers, Foner
brought the bodies in. Foner’s lesson isn’t whether Bread and Roses is possible in
another context, (he thought perhaps not) or whether workers will listen to an
oppositional message, or how to tug workers from the New York Post or
“Survivor.” Rather Foner
proved that an alternative labor culture doesn’t spring up. It can be invented however, with organization
and openness to a variety of methods.
I only met Moe Foner once, months before he died. What he was most interested in doing that day
was publicizing his almost completed memoir.
This meant getting on the phone for prospective cover blurbs and sales
commitments. Foner
said a good publicist had to be a “nudge,” and that he would be until the very
end.
[2] Leon
Fink and Brian Greenberg, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: A History of
Hospital Workers Union,
Local 1199 (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1989).
[3] Micahael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of
American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997).
[4] For two
critics see: Colette Hyman, Staging Strikes: Workers’ Theatre and the
American Labor Movement.
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997); and Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women,
Men and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis,
1915-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
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