In the build-up for Philly, we held a block party to raise funds. Beer was flowing freely. One of the neighbors called the police to cut off our sound system and loud music. Wally Klim, one of the main Milwaukee organizers for Vietnam Veterans against The War, was by my side. When the cops told me to pull the plug on the music, Wally asked me, “Should I do it?” Like an idiot, I said, “Turn it up. “ It was the alcohol speaking — and that defiant demon that I carried. Suddenly we were in another melee with the cops – not a good spot for a two-time loser on police battery charges. I was charged with disorderly conduct as were about a half dozen others.
My dad came with me to my disorderly conduct trial. “Your Honor,” he said, “I’m in the twilight of my career and I’d like the court’s permission to speak in favor of leniency for my son.” We didn’t win. I was sentenced to 30 days in the Milwaukee House of Correction. It was almost worth it to have that memory of my dad – still loyal after all I had put him and Mom through.
I don’t remember much about that short stint in the county jail. One of the meat cutter strikers was there. I never asked him what he had done. In the afternoons we went out to pull weeds on a plot that had never been planted. One hot afternoon an Indian inmate named Yellow Feather showed us a place where we could sneak off and swim in a fresh water spring. If you can’t mix in fun things to your hard times memoirs, what‘s the point?
Our movement was running out of steam due to a right ward shift in the country. White workers and suburbanites were attracted to Reaganite calls to cut benefits to the inner cities, to curtail school bussing and affirmative action, to clamp down on protest. The economy was tailing off.
Internationally, there was great confusion about how to navigate for social progress. The Soviet Union was at loggerheads with China. Mao had died. The Cultural Revolution that we had endorsed was being revealed as a time of chaos. The Vietnam War was over. I tried to study books and periodicals for some direction, but it was all way beyond me.
Only now, based on sifting through memory and trading stories with my old friends, can I get a clearer idea of how our work was skewed by our emphasis on building a revolutionary party. It all started at the top. Nationally, our numbers were ridiculously small. So when looking for approval from above, we tended to attach ourselves to those workers who enjoyed coming to our city wide activities. They were the supposed proof that we were expanding our influence at a higher level. Sometimes these “advanced” were not true rank-and-file leaders. I remember saying, “Hey it’s good to see you” more than specific discussions about “How do you organize?”
Once I was chosen to give a Sunday lecture on how capitalism benefits from unemployment. We filled a few dozen folding chairs at our Worker’s Center on North Ave. I studied up on it straight from writings by Karl Marx. As I explained the reserve army of labor, even I got bored. And there was Wency, one of the assembly line workers from Chrysler, sleeping in the third row. He was a Puerto Rican Vietnam vet and a member of the Fighting Times caucus. Wency was suffering from post-combat stress. He voiced feelings of guilt for things he had done in war and for surviving when many of his friends didn’t. Wenceslaus Roman died a couple years later, drowning in his own vomit during a heroin nod.
At the time, we were promoting a template which we called the “militant minority”. The idea was to assign importance to the most volatile elements in a union, thinking that they would take actions to inspire the majority. While this is often a general description of the process of resistance, it is not a full blown, all-encompassing strategy. Militant minority was more a description of what we were doing, rather than a prescription for what we should have been doing.
We could usually call on a decent core of the advanced. They may have been active in our Unemployed Workers Organizing Committee, Vietnam Veterans against The War, protests against police brutality and murder, or African Liberation Support. In 1978, we decided to formalize this network as a United Workers Organization. Looking back, this was driven by our need to cultivate the advanced as radical-minded allies. Our work in Milwaukee became the poster child for a nation-wide call to form such groups wherever the RCP was doing workplace organizing. In many areas this extra effort was impractical and counterproductive.
We organized a nation-wide gathering for the formation of a National United Workers Organization in Chicago at a big hotel on Michigan Ave. Like the mobilization in Philadelphia in 1976, it all looked good. Over a thousand were in attendance. It created the illusion that we really were national, united, organized, and workers. In reality, it represented a thin layer of labor organizers that did not have deep enough roots to affect many regional or industry-wide concerns.