> (J.B.) Matthews soured on the Party when
> Communist organizers in Norfolk, Virginia
> donned ku Klux Klan robes to terrorize
> Negroes so they would join the Amalgamated
> Clothing Workers (a dual union). "They said
> they were killing two birds with one stone, " he
> said. "That is, not only getting Negroes into the
> Union, but able to show how brutal the Klan
> was in the South."
Is there any evidence that this is true, or is it possible -- you know, on some kind of off-chance -- that a professional stool pigeon like JB Matthews just made up stuff like this?
Also, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers -- of Sidney Hillman fame -- were not a "dual union." They were the widely-recognized union in the men's clothing industry the way that the ILG was the union in the women's clothing industry. I have never seen it argued that Hillman was all that fond of the CPUSA; my recollection is that he was a Socialist, perhaps not as anticommunist as the Lovestoneites and ex-Socialists who eventually took over the ILG, but he was not sympathetic to the CP. Was Matthews or Michael's source referring to some other Third Period dual union? It's unclear from the context, and certainly this out-of-place detail casts doubt on the accuracy of the story as a whole.
Michael's habit of recycling weird and irresponsible charges like this -- sometimes from the distant McCarthyite past -- without credible documentation makes him an unreliable source of information in my view. He's good at citing books, but I wonder how many of them he's actually read, as opposed to skimmed?
- - - - - John Lacny
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!