Politics & Pork Chops

Little Joe, born on Manhattan's Second Avenue, was farmed out by his widowed mother to a German baker named Gus Schmall. He went to school for a while, ran off to sea, grew up and began having a chronic dream. In the dream Little Joe --now Big Joe--waved his hairy paw, whereupon the great ports of New York, Boston, Marseilles, San Francisco, Antwerp were paralyzed. All over the world shipping was paralyzed. Then the President of the U.S. called Joe and said: "Joe, you have paralyzed the world by a wave of your hand. What do you want?" Said Joe (in the dream): "More pork chops."

In Joe's language "pork chops" is more pay and shorter hours and more power for his Communist-line National Maritime Union. In Washington last week, Big Joe Curran pounded the table and argued raucously for the works. He had not confronted the President yet. Shipping might never be paralyzed. But it was a threat that hung over the room, where men were running out their bluffs as time ran out to a June 15 strike deadline.

Joe's bluff was solid. For the mariners' biggest battle in history he had other allies. Joe was co-chairman of the Committee for Maritime Unity which embraced six other powerful seagoing and dockside unions.* All but one--an independent--were C.I.O.

Friend the Ferret. The shipowners and Labor Department people in Washington had listened over & over again to what Joe had to say about his seamen.

Wartime bonuses had been taken off. Seamen got no unemployment insurance or protection under the Wage & Hour law. Deckhands worked 56 hours a week at sea, stewards 63. Because there was not enough work to go around, three months of every year they were "on the beach"--vacations for which they got no pay.

Six times Joe offered to cut his original demands down to a 44-hour week, stuck for a 30% pay rise. He did not want a strike; he said so. But he shouted: "A ship's crew including captain, engineer and all the officers would still average less than 75-c- an hour. I pay a sitter more than that to watch my baby." The owners, who gave the N.M.U. a $45 a month raise last October on W.L.B. orders, were not moved.

With Joe was his friend, lean, long-nosed Harry Bridges, there to negotiate on behalf of his own West Coast longshoremen. Smart, articulate Mr. Bridges, who denounced "the capitalist war" until Russia was attacked in 1941, expected no trouble. The operators, he was sure, would give him $1.38 an hour, up from $1.15. So Harry helped Joe, pouncing like a ferret at the operators when he saw an opening.

Did Frank J. Taylor, chief spokesman for the owners, maintain that cutting hours of ship's crews meant more men and more living quarters at the expense of revenue-bearing cargo? Bridges recalled--his Australian voice dripping with wide-eyed vowels--that merchant ships carried 30-man gun crews during the war and facilities for them were still in the ships.

To operate on a 44-hour-a-week basis only five men would have to be added to the crew, he said. (Shipping experts said ten.) As for costs, what about profits operators made during the war? Snarled Bridges: "What happened to $8 billion of U.S. funds which have not been properly accounted for by the War Shipping Administration and the Maritime Commission?" He was on uncertain ground there. A long and careful investigation is needed to prove or disprove that charge, an investigation which Vermont's Senator George Aiken and others in Congress have demanded.

Arm of Policy. Over the disputants hovered the Labor Department's chief conciliator, Edgar Warren, and his aides. On the sidelines sat two other Government men: War Shipping Administrator Captain Granville Conway and John Carmody of the Maritime Commission. They represented the U.S. Government, still the actual owner, because of its wartime operations, of 80% of the 6,000-ship U.S. merchant marine.

The U.S. time & again had stated its intention to maintain a strong merchant marine as "an arm of international policy." The U.S. had also stated its intention of getting the ships back in private hands. Said Vice Admiral William Ward Smith, recently appointed head of the Maritime Commission: "We will give the operators every help and encouragement." How much help would that be?

The operators waited. The wages Curran demanded would make it impossible for them to compete with foreign shipping overseas. (U.S. coastwise shipping is protected by monopoly.) And it was hard for them to believe the U.S. public would stand for the monumental subsidies that would be needed to let U.S. shipping compete with the rest of the world.

In Seattle, a maritime convention of the International Labor Office was meeting in an effort to set a minimum worldwide seamen's wage. But the minimum would not be anything like U.S. wages.* Chile shipowners pay their crews only $18 a month. Canadians pay $90. The rest of the world ranges in between. Scandinavian countries pay $80. Britain, which would give the U.S. the hottest competition, pays $80.

First Try. Joe Curran's game had started weeks ago. To Joe's porkchop demands his Communist associates had added some ideological parsley. It was high time "to halt the drive of shipowners . . . towards a new and more devastating world war." So Joe said blithely: "Hit the bricks June 15," knowing that 73,000 East Coast seamen would obey.

Harry Bridges bossed the West Coast longshoremen. The pair of them, co-chairmen of C.M.U., could pull out 200,000 men. At home it would be almost as formidable a strike as the railways. Around the world it would be worse.

The President had surprised them with his handling of the railway strike. Joe was afraid that Harry Truman would use the Navy to move the ships. He nervously went back to his men, hoping they "wouldn't kick my head in," but afraid that a strike would run the union "into a situation like the railroads." Joe Curran was afraid his union might be wrecked. So, for that matter, were his Marxist associates, who had their own private aims, beyond the aims of the union's rank-&-file. Joe had an offer from the shipowners which he said he hoped the membership would accept: a 9% boost in wages instead of the 30% he had demanded. The membership of N.M.U. did not kick his head in, but they rejected it.

Joe went back to try again. The President alerted the Navy. Around the world battle lines were drawn. A nation fed up with strikes waited wearily.

Workers, Unite. The maritime unions oiled their strike machinery, began distributing a strike fund of $1,000,000, organized soup kitchens, field headquarters, field hospitals. They went to the World Federation of Trade Unions for support--this was to be a worldwide job.

Secretary General Louis Sallant of France passed the word to the world's docks. The trade unions of Latin America agreed not to handle cargoes moved by non-strikers. New Zealand waterside workers promised their support. The Trainmen's Alexander F. Whitney, still smarting from the drubbing given him by the President, wired his moral support. If that meant practical support, trainmen would refuse to transport any Navy-delivered cargoes from docksides.

Support for the C.I.O. unions even came from the rival and hated A.F.L.--from Harry Lundeberg's seamen. Afraid of having his membership find him sitting on his duff, he demanded that operators negotiate with him, too, and staged work stoppages along both coasts to underline his impatience. John Hawk, secretary-treasurer of Lundeberg's seamen growled: "Joe Curran is a punk and chowderhead," but A.F.L. seamen would not cross his lines.

Would the workers of the world unite? Hell, even the A.F.L. boys were coming in. They had to.

Grimly the armed forces of the nation got ready. The Navy figured that 10,000 officers and 50,000 men would be required to man the ships essential to the nation's sustenance. The Army prepared to load and unload, the Coast Guard to protect the port areas. Big, tough Major General B. M. Bryan, provost marshal, got ready to secure the beach.

Said the Curran-Bridges strike committee: They will move the ships "only over our dead bodies." The committee spoke for many a man who had been a hero of the war himself, on the Murmansk run, on the dread, lonely reaches of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and wherever German planes and U-boats operated. Some 6,000 merchant seamen had died in the war. To a nation which likes to reward its heroes, bloodletting along the waterfront was an appalling thought.

Europe and Asia watched, knowing that the lives of hundreds of thousands of their people depended on grain-laden U.S. ships moving in an uninterrupted stream. Bridges promised: "We will carry food." Russia watched, remembering that some of the most violent chapters in world revolution have been written along the world's waterfronts and on ships at sea.

Birth of a Union. In the middle of this turmoil stood Joe Curran, the loudmouthed, naive and slightly bewildered young man with a genius for organization who started the N.M.U. ten years ago with one idea: more pork chops.

Joe's mother was a cook who had to work at her trade; that was why she boarded out little Joe with the family of Gus Schmall. His mother reclaimed him when she got married again to a painter and decorator in Westfield, N.J., where Joe managed to get through the seventh grade of school, caddied and worked around. He went to sea as a deck boy in 1922 at age 16.

He got his AB ticket after three years and a bellyful of stinking quarters and nasty food. One night he went below after standing a long wheelwatch in the Delaware River. In tracing his career Joe likes to recall the occasion and the smell in the crew's mess. "It was chicken and it was rotten. I grabbed a hunk and took it to the skipper's quarters. He said, 'Get that goddam thing out of here. Do you want to make me puke?' I said, 'That's what you are giving us to eat.' At Philadelphia he fired me." It was one of many ships Joe got fired from.

Ten years ago Joe shipped out of New York on the S.S. California, as a member of the now defunct A.F.L. Seamen's Union. When he got to the West Coast he discovered that union leaders had made a wage agreement discriminating against East Coast sailors. He led the crew in a sitdown strike, which ended only when Labor Secretary Frances Perkins telephoned a special and personal appeal. But when the California got back to New York Curran & crew were fired. All along the East Coast sympathetic sailors walked off their ships. A strike committee was organized with Joe as chairman. That was the birth of the N.M.U.

Big Joe's Big Union. N.M.U. has become big-chested since then, with 46 branches, a staff of 500 employes, a payroll totaling $1.5 million a year, and a membership of 73,000. It has done wonders in improving the food, quarters, working conditions and pay of its members, and that is what makes it strong even though its members know that around their boss, Joe Curran, sits the most effective group of Commie union officers on the East Coast.

N.M.U.'s apparatus includes some of the slickest trade-union literature in the world, most of it the work of Leo Huberman, onetime labor editor of PM, and N.M.U. publicity director until he recently joined Reynal & Hitchcock, book publishers. Members are laboriously trained in procedures. Skippers have learned to respect and fear the shipboard committees who handle seamen's beefs.

In 1941 N.M.U. moved its headquarters from a ramshackle building on Manhattan's West Street to a six-story building, once a telephone exchange, which shoulders aside the ancient tenements and sailors' lodging houses along 17th Street. N.M.U. spent $400,000 making its headquarters what Joe thought it ought to be --clean, well-lighted, comfortable.

The "hiring hall," which can hold 3,000, is generally filled with men waiting their turn at jobs. Rotation of jobs, i.e., hiring from a union list instead of by favoritism, was one of the reforms N.M.U. wrung out of shipowners. Hiring formerly was a racket ridden by graft.

On the top floor is a big paneled conference room. There hang the photographs of three" N.M.U. heroes: Roosevelt, Tito and another Joe--Stalin--in the center place of honor.

Next door is a paneled office filled with leather divans. There sits Curran, his hat cocked over one eye, his feet usually cocked up on the elegant, modernistic desk.

Family Man. Behind him is a picture of his two-year-old son, Joe Paul, named in part for Paul Robeson, the Negro singer, whom Joe greatly admires. Joe Paul's mother is the second Mrs. Curran, Retta Toble, a husky redhead and onetime stewardess on the Grace Line. Joe was divorced from the first Mrs. Curran. The current Mrs. Curran is "the best cook in the world." Joe's favorite is Spanish rice. When he is at the office he eats at the Port Cafeteria around the corner, dining on corned beef & cabbage and strawberry ice cream sundaes with whipped cream.

He attends Catholic services occasionally and quietly. Said a friend: "Among the top officials of the union it's not very stylish to go to church."

Joe's men are pretty sure that Joe is no Communist, although in the past he has been a steady fellow traveler. He has taken on the coloration around him, like a chameleon. Now he wants to clean the Marxists out. In the middle of his struggle with the shipowners he is facing an internal feud. The Commies hope to grab everything but Joe's job. Joe is a good man to have around for a while.

The fight has already begun. It depends on the returns of rank & file balloting for a new National Office, hierarchy of the N.M.U. The ballots have been cast. They are dribbling in from all around the world.

Curran will be re-elected president hands down. The Marxist politicians who would like to control the predominantly non-Communistic but tough, restive and cynical U.S. seamen are making their drive for other key jobs. If they win what they are trying for, Curran will be brought to heel more thoroughly than he ever was before--and that was something.

In the hands of the Marxist group the future course of the N.M.U. is unchartable. The Marxist members of the office were ready to retreat last week, knowing that a strike against U.S. ships now would rouse the resentment of the world. But U.S. ships would not always be carrying food for the starving. Sooner or later they would be back in normal trade.

Then would be the time to strike, when the U.S. merchant marine was fighting for its place on the sea. Then the workers of the world might be roused to unite and the arm of U.S. international policy paralyzed. The ruckus stirred up last week by Joe Curran and Harry Bridges showed what might be done. Other men also had dreams.

*National Maritime Union, International Longshoremen's & Warehousemen's Union, American Communications Association, Inlandboatmen's Union, Marine Engineers' Beneficial Association, National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards, and Pacific Coast Marine Firemen, Oilers, Water-tenders & Wipers Association (independent).

*Some examples: ordinary seamen, $127.50 a month; able seamen, $145; assistant cook, $162.50; junior engineer, $187.50; purser, $195; chief electrician, $252.

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