Joe Jacobs Interview 4

 JAMIE STONEY: Got your red light. All right, sir.

JOE JACOBS: At that time, one has to remember that when Roosevelt came in that the banks had failed, Roosevelt had come in said that the new day was dawning, and that he was going to make sure that the little man -- the common man -- would be able to make a decent living. And then he started all these programs that we had at that time. CCC, the WPA, all of the different "Make Work" programs to give people jobs. Of course, as I remember it, at the early stages of it, there was some 15 million unemployed, almost a third of the workforce in 00:01:00this country had no jobs. When they were giving them jobs, they figured, "Well, we'll get a halfway decent pay." And what was happening was that most of them were on the minimum pay that they were req-- being required to pay. Under the Blue Eagle of the NRA, they were supposed to set up for each industry, the conditions under which they would work. For the first time, they heard about short work weeks. It wasn't like when I was a kid of some 12 or so when 60 hours was the nor m, and that meant 10 hours a day. And over in my end of the country, some of the mines were open on Saturdays, so if you wanted to work a little extra, you could work, but you got regular pay. But all of these things that they thought meant a new day where they could make a better living for themselves did not eventuate, because instead of making more money, by the time 00:02:00they got through collecting the little bit that they got, we find that the cotton textile owner was figuring, "Well, now wait a minute. If I've got to pay that much more on that, instead of 50 cents a month for the house, for a room," which was a dollar and a half, or whatever the amount was, "we'll add another quarter for each room." That meant 75 cents. You add the -- another 75 cents, take it off his pay, instead of going up, it goes down. Not only that, but they were beginning at that time, also, to start, what we called, a "stretch out." And the stretch out meant that they were setting quotas. Where, before, they didn't pay ya anything to talk about, so they could turn around and if you didn't work as hard as one of the kids came running in -- and I can remember, in the old days, the doors used to be open, the kids would 00:03:00come running in, when they got off of school, and they'd see their mother, and she, she would tell them what they had for lunch or she might have had their lunch, and they went out and sat out on the mill steps and ate their lunch right there. None of the good days came. Instead of making more money, if they made any more, it was because they increased their workload. That's why they started calling it the stretch out. Because they was making them do more work, and when the total net result came along, they didn't have that kind of money. In addition to that, they had promised that people would have a right to bargain for themselves, if -- those were the days when the section 7A came along, where they were taught -- finally the Wagner Act had to come after the Blue Eagle fell down. They wanted a voice. And I have found, in the years that have gone by, 00:04:00that so many people who've had no contact with unions want to get a union when they find that they're working in a plant, nobody pays any attention to them. Things don't get any better, they look down the road, they see they're not ever gonna be anywhere. They're not gonna be millionaires, they're not gonna be able to make a decent living for themselves, it means that they're caught in a -- like a squirrel on a revolving wheel that goes round and round and round. They don't go anywhere. And that's the reason so many of them got attracted to the union. That's the reason so many of them responded when that strike came, because that was the revolution. It was a revolution, not of despair, but of hope. Where they wanted to have a better living. They found out, in that strike, though, that when those people who work for a living tried to 00:05:00improve their lot, and it was not given to them by those who control their destiny and their livelihood, that they wouldn't let them have a voice. They wo uldn't let them have their say. And then they found out later those that were active, that they were blacklisted. Because of the blacklist, too, which, which happened at that time, later on, when the CIO began their industrialization, in the plants in the Midwest, and in the automobile and steel and elsewhere, they were ready to leave the textile mills and see if they could do better up there. Because they figured, "Well, maybe there's a place where I can make a better living. There's a place where I can improve my lot." And a lot of them went that way. Not only the whites who were in textile mills, but also the blacks who were on the farms at that time.

GEORGE STONEY: Could I ask you something about -- there was a convention in, in 00:06:00August of '34. A lot of southerners went up there, and according to Stol Statin, who sends you regards --

JACOBS: Yes.

GEORGE STONEY: They, they were -- the southerners really pushed the union to call a strike, when they really weren't ready. Do you know anything about that?

JACOBS: Yeah.

GEORGE STONEY: Could you tell us about it? Remember, now, the audience hasn't heard my question.

JACOBS: Yeah. Well, I forget the date of the convention that took place. I was not at the convention, but I talked to a number of people who were there, and the people who came out of the south, where the new locals were, were imbued with a desire to see something done. They thought to prevail at the convention to have more organizers sent to the south. Because they wanted to be able to get 00:07:00organized and emulate those people that were in New England, where they had some organization, and where they had been organized over a period of time. Because when they talked with those delegates, and they heard of some of the conditions that they had, some of the workload controls that they had, some of the work conditions that they had, some of the treatment that they got, how they could handle grievances, they said, "Why not us?" They hadn't had enough organization in the south, so they pushed for it. I'm not sure whether the people who were then in charge of the UTW were in a position to level with them and really te ll them the truth, "Look, we're a poor union. We can't hire all those organizers. If it's gonna be done, you got to do it yourself. Whether you can do it by yourself, we don't know, because you've had no real 00:08:00union experience." And that's why, when I have talked with them in days afterwards, I had heard about their effort to do it, they did not get that much, in terms of organizers and help, to come down here. As a matter of fact, that was part of the criticism that was later launched by the TWOC years afterwards, when the CIO came in, that they should have done more than they did. Gorman and his people had tried to get the AF of L to contribute money to them. They did not have the kind of money then that they have now, either. They would give it to them in driblets. They would give it to them in small sums. I can remember in, uh, talking with Gorman in years after that, where he told me that in one of the meetings that they had -- and I'm just now trying to remember whether Greene was already in the picture, or whether it was still Gompers, but I think 00:09:00it was Greene -- where, after he tried to persuade him to get a lot of organizers to help, that he said, "If we furnish you an organizer, will you put one on the payroll?" And that Gorman responded something to this effect, "If we had money to put one on the payroll, I wouldn't be here asking you for money. Much less being able to match."

GEORGE STONEY: Could you talk ab-- you obviously knew Gorman, personally, from --

JACOBS: Oh, yes.

GEORGE STONEY: Describe him and tell us something about him. And mention Gorman's name.

JACOBS: Well, I met Gorman while that, uh, strike was going on. I met him once when he came down to Atlanta and had a meeting with a number of his people. Uh, 00:10:00the reason that I saw Gorman, met him, and wa-- know as much, probably, about the textile union and some of these other unions is that I was the only union lawyer down here. And they used to invite me. And I used to go. And I used to catch hell at home because I was always going to meetings. I still do. Gorman was a good textile worker, he knew the industry. That was a real plus for him. I have seen him when he started talking with people who looked at him with a jaundiced eye, so to speak, and wonder, "Well, who is this fella and what does he know about us?" When he got to talking with them about the spinning room and the combing room and the weave room, and the belts on the machine, and how many machines they run, and how many spindles there is, and how, and how many doffs you have to have, and what the schedule of doffs are, and all of the mechanics of it, he won them over. The place that he lost them was that he did 00:11:00not have the money, the staff, the organization, to do the job that had to be done. I don't remember how many thousand members they had there, but it was infinitesimal in comparison with the whole industry. And Gorman was head and shoulders, by the way, above a lot of the people who were his executive officers. Because he drew them out of the mills. They'd have no real experience. If they had experience, they were -- some of them were old timers who had been an officer of the union and were, were on what I call "the road to retirement." And they knew all the answers of how you were supposed to organize, but didn't do the work that had to be. When he would come into a town -- and I have seen this happen -- and I think this was up in Charlotte, 00:12:00North Carolina -- and he contacted the AF of L, the AF of L were the building trades. When he would talk to the building trades about organizing, about trying to get the people in and getting them to a meeting, getting them to join, they didn't understand him, because the building trades is a completely different life, where they have hiring halls where they furnish the laborers, where they travel from one town to another, to work from one contractor today and another next year, and another in a month from now. They could not understand, "What do you mean, 'Organize, sign cards?'" The only time you signed a card in the building trades was when you signed a membership card, took the oath, if you were a journeyman, while you were a journeyman, if you were not, you were an apprentice, you went through the program and all the other. Textile isn't that way. Gorman wasn't that way. They weren't talking the same language. I can remember when we -- when he went up there and asked them if they would set up a 00:13:00committee to work with him to organize in the Cohen Mills that they were up there. They looked at him, they, they could -- "What do you mean? We" -- I can remember, one of them, and I think he was an electrician saying, "Well, we work for the Cohen Mills. Whenever they got any electrical problems, they call whatever the contractor's name was, and we take care of all the maintenance work." And I can remember him trying to explain, "We don't operate that way. We work for the mill, itself, day in and day out, and these people are subject to whatever conditions that the owners put in, and what we're trying to do is get those people to join our union. We have to get them to join."

GEORGE STONEY: Do you think that the -- those AF of L fellas felt -- shared some of the feelings of people around the cotton mills, that these were inferior people?

JACOBS: No question.

GEORGE STONEY: Could you say --

JACOBS: No question. The, the -- a lot of the building tradesmen, at that time, 00:14:00and some of them still do, look upon themselves as craftsmen. That they are skilled. And textile workers, lintheads, that's what they were called. They'd call them that to their heads. To their face. Were inferior. Not only that, but there was a reason for it, too, because a lot of these people were only the second and third grade. And then had to go to work in the textile mill. A lot of the building tradesmen, if they did not finish grammar school, that -- did not finish high school, when they were learning their trade, they'd learn how to read a blueprint, they had to learn how to read instructions about how you put in a particular set of wires. If it was a carpenter, he had to learn the blueprints, he had to learn how to use tools, he had to learn to use a lot of things. They used to say about, about the textile workers -- I can remember -- "They don't have to know nothing, just hire them today, put them all to work, and in an hour's time, if they don't know how to do it, throw them 00:15:00out." I've heard building tradesmen say that. I've heard cotton mill owners say the same thing. That it -- that it's an unskilled job. But every type of work, including textile work, is skilled. It has a certain amount of skill. The building tradesmen reflected the community.

GEORGE STONEY: That's a great start. All right, now, uh, how did you get involved? You've told us a little bit, but I want to get -- I mean, here you are, you're a young lawyer, you're not a textile worker -- I want you to say all this --

JACOBS: Yeah.

GEORGE STONEY: How did you get involved?

JACOBS: Well, I got involved in the trade union not because my people were textile workers, but I got involved in it because my father was a member of the meat cutter's union. Uh, he belonged to the meat cutters. Uh, he migrated from Europe, came out of Poland, came out of a textile town, by the name of Lodz. L-O-D-Z. Biggest textile industry in the country was right there. However, he 00:16:00did not follow that trade. His folks decided that when he was coming along to apprentice to a butcher, or meat cutter, and he learned that trade. When he came to this country, he came, originally, to Patterson, New Jersey, which is where a lot of the textile workers came. That's where they have the narrow fabric weavers there, and that was the center of it for years, and some of the finest weaving that was done in this country. Uh, finally migrated to this end of the country. Migrated, as a matter of fact, to Birmingham, which is where my mother's sister lived. And there, engaged in his occupation as a meat cutter, and joined t he meat cutter's union. He belonged to an organization called "The Arbeter Ring," which translated into English, is "The Workman's Circle." The Workman's Circle, among its leadership, had people like 00:17:00Hellman, Dubinsky, Zuritsky, and others who were their predecessors, who -- whose names escape me, who were the early leaders of the trade union movement. Jewish, fraternal order, and the reason they had the Jewish fraternal order was because, at that time, people who came to this country needed housing, healthcare, and a place to bury them. And a place where they could meet folks and talk with them. And the Workman's Circle did that. The Workman's Circle set up the first cemeteries, the Workman's Circle set up the first healthcare programs. The Workman's Circle had lectures of all kinds, primarily in Yiddish. Some in Russian, some in Polish. And the leadership of the trade unions, of the garment workers, of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the hatters, the meat cutters -- yes, as a matter of fact, even the pain ters, in 00:18:00the New York area -- were substantially immigrants and a large number Jewish, who came to this country and who joined those unions. My father was active in the Workman's Circle. I've often said that he was uh, what's this man? Paul Bunyan? Wherever he went, he organized a Workman's Circle branch. He was in, uh, Birmingham, he organized Branch 303, helped to organize it. There was one here in Atlanta -- oh, he organized them all over. He was in a convention of the Worker's Circle, it was held in New York, and in the course of that convention, he saw Dubinsky, Zuritsky, and I'm trying to remember who it was from the Amalgamated -- it was not Hellman, but it was someone else from the Amalgamated. And they were talking about the fact that they had to come south 00:19:00and organize. And they said, "Well, when we come down there, do you know anything about the trade union movement?" He could tell them a little about Birmingham, but he couldn't tell them about other places. "Do you know any good lawyers down there , because we know we're gonna have problems." That's when he said, "My son is a lawyer." That came natural. When the first trip that Zuritsky and Dubinsky took to Atlanta, they told me they were coming, I met them, and they arranged for me to try and help them. I was supposed to be their eye, ear, and uh, not confidant, but to tell them anything that would help them in the work down here. Dubinsky was able, through his control of the market in New York, to organize a plant down here, the Saul 00:20:00Klenberg plant, which, at that time, had some 400 people, and he -- we looked around, there was a cutter in there that he put on the staff, and from there on, I began to represent trade unions. The only other lawyer who had ever done any work for them in this end of the country was the man who was a city attorney, and they used him for political reasons. And that's how I got involved in the trade union movement.

GEORGE STONEY: OK, now (coughs) before you were telling me about -- you were describing what a Flying Squadron looked like.

JACOBS: Yeah.

GEORGE STONEY: Could you do that again? And call it the Flying Squadron.

JACOBS: Well, when, when this revolution that I talked about before started growing, as the groups of people were being organized -- and what they were doing, they would organize local, uh, 202 over here in the Dunning Mills, 00:21:00they'd organized local 203 and the Bibb Mill they organized local 204, and the Calloway Mills. There was no real tie-in except through the organizers. When the people started coming out, we kept getting calls. I think the man's name was Hollihan who was the international representative here at that time. Hollihan was a good person. His big problem was that he never liked to work too hard, but he would work. He was no particular genius, he was a plotter, and I remember that we got together in Atlanta with a number of people. There was another organizer named Judd. Oh, the others escape me. There must have been six or 00:22:00eight that had come in. He wanted to talk with them, wanted to see what we could do. I remember they started coming out so fast, he couldn't keep up with it. So, we sat down and we started thinking, "How in the world can you do?" We had a few of the new people who had come out of the mills and one of them -- I don't think it was any of us old heads that said it -- one of them said, "Well, why don't we get a group of people together, and go -- have them go from one mill to another, Flying Squadrons, and help bring them out to do that marching around that I talked about a little bit ago. And we'll get a Flying Squadron in this area, another one in this area, another one in this area, and that way we can cover a lot more than the handful of organizers, because the organizer can't do it. When we get them out, tell us what you want us to do and how to set it up, and we'll go with that." And that's how it was, you 00:23:00remember that long line I talked about, where they were signing the receipts? Part of the job of the Flying Squadrons was to bring them out of the plant, when they brought them out, sign them up, get -- and on this receipt that was supposed to get the not only correct name, b ut the correct address. That day we didn't talk about telephones, because they didn't have telephones in the mill village. If you wanted to use a telephone, in those days, you went either to the commissary -- and I didn't tell ya about that, that's where they charged the company's price, not the price that you pay downtown. And, a lot of places, why the company would give you some scrip that you could use in the company's store and then in advance of getting your pay, if you ran short, they wouldn't lend you the money, but they'd give you scrip. The scrip meant you had to pay -- buy in the company store. In that way is -- these Flying Squadrons pulled them out, signed them up. Then the organizer could try to come 00:24:00in and try to do something, that they would have already laid a lot of the groundwork. We started those Flying Squadrons as the real surge wave took place, where the -- everyday in the paper, there was something about this mill. The people had come out this mill, they'd come out this mill, they'd com e out. One of the mistakes, I think, that the owners of the mills did was that they let the papers report some of the news. If they hadn't reported it, it wouldn't have spread like it did, as fast as it did. This helped for it to spread. And these Flying Squadrons would be formed, men and women, and they would go to a particular number of mills, that they would say, "We gonna go tomorrow or the next day," they'd lay out the number of mills. We tried to get some kind of order in it. Hard to do, because we would forget some of the smaller mills, or forget a mill or not think of one because the people we were talking with 00:25:00weren't aware of it. The flying squadron became notorious, if we want to call it that, because of the incident with the Newnan bit, where they -- the National Guard went down there. And that, in itself, is another story.

GEORGE STONEY: OK, now, I want you to talk to me about the -- about Talmadge and the National Guard, and that--

JAMIE STONEY: Uh, George?

JACOBS: Yeah.

GEORGE STONEY: Yeah.

JAMIE STONEY: There's only five minutes on this tape.

JACOBS: You're running out.

GEORGE STONEY: OK, we'll, we'll go on for a while.

JAMIE STONEY: OK.

GEORGE STONEY: Thank you. Tell me about Talmadge and the National Guard.

JACOBS: Well, there were rumors rolling that Talmadge was gonna call the National Guard out. Talmadge, at that time, was running for office. In the speeches that he made -- and I can hear him and see him flapping his red suspenders, "I promise I will not call out the National Guard. I will not 00:26:00treat the citizens of Georgia that way. The National Guard will sit in their barracks." All this other business. And he didn't call them out until he got elected, and I think it was either the day after or two days after, and the story that floated at that time was that he was paid $25,000 by the textile barons either before or right after he got elected. If before, then it was a campaign contribution. If it was afterward, I don't know what you would have called it. And he called the guard out. Up until that time, though, he promised they would not be called out, and he used to say about -- I can remember him saying that there were the sheriffs who were keeping law and order, and then in the cities, the police force wer e keeping law and order. No reason to call the 00:27:00National Guard out. He called them out, and then when the Flying Squadron hit Newnan, just by coincidence, I was up there at the state capitol. And that's a story in itself. And that story is that we had heard a rumor that he was going to try and pick up the Flying Squadrons. Hollihan had called his office, claimed that he had talked to someone whose name I cannot remember. Who was one of his lieutenants' chief men, and had been assured that there was nothing to the rumor, just like there had not been anything to the rumor. But we kept hearing it all day long, and I remember George Googe, who was the head of the AF of L in this end of the country, at that time, called me up and said, "Joe, why don't you go over to the state capital and see what you can find out. Just nose around." And I said, "Well, all right, I'll work up some excuse." 00:28:00The state capital, at that time, the courts were there, the adjutant general's office was there and everything else. And I got o ver there. Just as I got over there, as I was walking into the office of where the National Guard is, and I looked outside, there was a parking lot out there, I saw all of this brass. The man who was adjutant general, who later on, I think, became general counsel for Delta and then died in a crash, can't think of his name. Getting into cars, and there was a whole line of them. And these were not, uh, regular National Guard. These were officers. These were like adjutant general and the captains and lieutenants and majors and all this, and I'm looking at it, and I -- something's happening. Now, what's happening? I don't know. At that time, the headquarters of the, uh, City Federation was, uh, about a block and a half away. I ran over there, and Hollihan had an office there, and I told him what I 00:29:00saw. I said, "They going somewhere, they're doing something. Where are the Flying Squadrons?" Well, the only activity that he knew was the one that was the Newnan group.

GEORGE STONEY: O--