New Boss of the A.F.L.

In the top-floor conference room of the American Federation of Labor's seven-story headquarters in Washington, the big portrait of William Green, late A.F.L. president, was shrouded in black. To the left of it hung another portrait, un-shrouded and just as large. Seated beneath his own picture one day last week, the A.F.L.'s Secretary-Treasurer George Meany announced that the Executive Council of the A.F.L. had just chosen him as Green's successor and the Federation's fourth president in its 70-year history.

Display of Might. In burly (5 ft. 11 in., 200 Ibs.) George Meany, the A.F.L. had found a leader far different from quiet, colorless Bill Green. The son of a New York plumber and himself an apprentice plumber at 16, Meany, now 58, is a genial extrovert who firmly believes that a labor leader should be concerned with more than pork chops for his boys. An aggressive speaker with a talent for sticking to the pertinent facts, he became business representative for New York Plumbers Local 463 at 28. At 40, he was the youngest president of the New York State Federation of Labor since Samuel Gompers.

A year later, due largely to Meany's persuasiveness and persistence, the state legislature had passed a fat stack of pro-labor bills, e.g., the state's first unemployment insurance law. In 1939, after organizing a mammoth 15-hour parade up New York's Fifth Avenue, an impressive display of labor's might, he was elected A.F.L. Secretary-Treasurer. Since then he has concentrated on public relations (he got the A.F.L. to sponsor regular news broadcasts) and relations with unions abroad (he spearheaded the post-World War II fight against U.S. labor's participation in the Soviet-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions). Strongly antiCommunist, Meany became heir apparent to Green in 1947 after he balked John L. Lewis' try for a seat on the A.F.L. Executive Council by hammering at Lewis' opposition to the Taft-Hartley law provision requiring labor leaders to take a non-Communist oath. In one of the few public squelches Lewis has ever suffered, Meany charged that the mineworkers' boss had "made a fellowship" with "all the . . . stinking American-haters who love Moscow."

Sweet Reason. Meany's first major act as A.F.L. president last week was to announce that he was reviving an A.F.L. committee set up in 1950 to discuss reunification with the C.I.O. Carefully avoiding Green's lofty "come back to the house of labor" tone, Meany said: "We've got to look at this thing the way it is. They [the C.I.O.] have an organization . . . They are a trade union and so are we. We've both got to bargain."

This note of sweet reason, however came at an awkward time. In a series of closed sessions before this week's C.I.O. convention at Atlantic City, C.I.O. bigwigs had failed to reach a behind-the-scenes settlement of the rivalry between the two leading candidates to succeed the late Phil Murray as C.I.O. president: the United Auto Workers' Walter Reuther and C.I.O. Vice President Allan Haywood. Barring a last minute agreement, the C.I.O. seemed in danger of having to choose its president in an open and probably bitter fight on the floor of the convention. Not until the C.I.O. re-established its own unity could it give attention to unification with George Meany's A.F.L.

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