The Milwaukee Worker became my next project. I look back on those years with great affection. I found myself going out almost daily to strike picket lines, to interview victims of police brutality, to listen to court hearings, to research facts in the public library. My new family of radical journalists included Margie Crosby, John Kaye, Sheila Huck, Chuck Reitzner, Bridget Sullivan, and David Fox.
Local workers papers were a key component of the practice of the RU in a couple of dozen industrial cities across the US and the coal fields of West Virginia. These radical broadsheets were an expression of the Maoist concept of “mass line”. In other words, we would listen to the concerns and experiences of people involved in some struggle or other. Then we would try to summarize that reality and get the word out for others to lend support. It was all common sense. We strained to make that style a hallmark of our work. It’s so easy to substitute your own ideas of what is actually happening and to invent unrealistic plans. In the daily work, we were good at learning the complaints and concerns; in the bigger picture, not always.
We got an initial sense that such a newspaper could take hold among our chosen constituencies – factory workers and minorities. When the first issue was hot off the presses, we deployed at all six gates of the massive AO Smith truck frame plant on the North Side. The workforce was heavily African American. The scene could have been easily mistaken for Detroit. Our first banner headline was about a Black man who had shot two policemen. The cover photo seemed to imply that we had some new information on the case. We sold six hundred copies on one shift change. But as we clung to a left wing identity in our pages, readership dropped off dramatically.
In writing my memoirs, I discovered a fact that we had overlooked in those days. A Milwaukee Journal article quoted a witness as saying that there were a number of guys hanging out at the “Commando House” that night across the street from the incident. Was this a reference to the NAACP Council Commandos? Was it a deliberate community defense act to kill the two cops who were beating up a young guy they had pulled out of a car? Could we have investigated more? Should we have framed our article more in the context of rage? Inner city Milwaukee was home to thousands who had escaped the frying pan of a very brutal southland only to land in a fire. Despite our earlier fascination with the Black Panthers, we probably didn’t completely appreciate the mutual hate of the oppressors and the oppressed. We didn’t follow up on the Ben Sanders court case.
On re-reading some Milwaukee Worker articles, I am beginning to realize that our accounts of factory life and struggles tended to be somewhat superficial. We would lay out some facts. And put in good buzz words like unity and struggle. We did not have enough in-depth understanding of the specific issues – like the positions of different slates in union elections or the balance sheets of specific companies. Guidance in fighting back always pointed in the same direction, the formation of a rank and file caucus. We were new to the labor movement.
Unionized workers won cost of living concessions in the early 70s. As we tossed around references to revolution, people saw it as a hollow call. It is easy to see now why we didn’t reach our potential as a vibrant alternative to the boring Milwaukee Labor Press, which focused heavily on union election results and bowling tournaments.
Somewhere along the way, I lost my archive of those old yellowed copies of The Milwaukee Worker. But I do have a complete set of the paper that I edited previous to my incarceration. The Red Star Express had an underlying theme of “youth will make the revolution”. It never promoted any of the factory conflicts that would become a staple of The Milwaukee Worker. In this sense, The Worker was a step in the right direction. But that same call for revolution remained. Our key concern should have been to enhance worker capacity to defend gains against ceaseless encroachments. Projecting such impossibility as imminent revolution weakened our credibility.
I couldn’t begin to list all of the interesting people that I met as a crusading journalist. Once we traveled to interview a dairy farmer who had organized dumping of milk to protest low prices. Another time I hooked up with the Sidekicks, an African-American motorcycle club, writing about their complaints of police harassment. An escort by these bikers was a regular feature at our May Day marches. I was the first to publicize a picket line by a group of inner city grocery store workers. Before long, the “good doing Dr. Bop” was advising radio listeners to stop shopping there until the demands were met.
I once interviewed Cleotha Hood, a welder in one of our rank and file caucuses. I wrote about his reaction to old time songs like “Food Stamp Blues” and “The Eisenhower Blues” when he lived in Yazoo City, Mississippi. We reprinted a short story written by one of our factory contacts. It was about a chain gang that stood up inter-racially against a brutal overseer. Six Bullets Ain’t Enough was so well-written, that now I wonder if it might have been plagiarized.
In cultural work we promoted a band called Hammer and Steel. They were great for big indoor rallies, a mix of Woody Guthrie folk stuff and original pieces about our Milwaukee reality. Chuck Reitzner had been a drummer in a popular psychedelic band on the East Side. Roy played base. And Jonny Rosen was the lead guitarist.
Nationally the RU pushed a husband and wife folk rock team named “Prairie Fire”. Even their name was a tip off of how we thought. It came from a Little Red Book pearl of wisdom, “A single spark can start a prairie fire.” When they toured Milwaukee, I booked them as entertainment at the House of Correction. They brought down the house with “Arise ye prisoners of starvation” from the Internationale. It was like the response Johnny Cash got at Folsom prison when he sang, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”