Common Sense and a Little Fire by Annelise Orleck

Author:Annelise Orleck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2017-07-17T16:00:00+00:00

THE NRA, DAVID DUBINSKY, AND WORKERS’ EDUCATION IN THE AGE OF INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM, 1930–1945

Between the Crash of 1929 and the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, the ILGWU slid toward dissolution as membership and financing withered away. Racketeering was rampant in the garment trades, and sweatshops once again began to replace the larger shops. Manufacturers fled New York, heading to the South and the Midwest in search of nonunion workers. At such a time, Cohn’s insistence on keeping the union’s “soul” alive seemed more frivolous than ever to Benjamin Schlesinger, who was once again president of the ILGWU. With the union desperate for funds, he suspended Cohn’s salary. Brookwood hovered on the brink of bankruptcy, and the union was considering selling Cohn’s beloved Unity House, the workers’ country retreat. Her situation was dire, she told a friend on the University of Chicago faculty: “Circumstances cornered and trapped me and it is very difficult for me to escape their deadly effect. I remember how complimentary you were about my office. It is no longer as it used to be. I have no permanent assistance. Nothing is being filed and it looks like a storage room. You would not recognize it.”76

The stress seems to have strained her closest friendship as well. She lashed out at Theresa Wolfson, accusing her of not being supportive. Perhaps, too, there was a crisis about the nature of their relationship. Wolfson snapped back: “I . . . thought that I am building a lasting friendship but it seems that I failed in this. . . . You intimate that I have no intention of seeing you. I can come and see you but will you be satisfied with a conventional visit? I am waiting to hear from you.” A nudge but not a fool, Cohn recovered her equilibrium. She mended fences with Wolfson and hustled funds to save Unity House, and with Preston’s help, Brookwood hung on a while longer.77

At this low ebb in the union’s history, the forty-eight-year-old Cohn returned to street-level organizing for the first time in fourteen years. Together with WTUL organizer Sadie Reisch, Cohn mobilized the young women of Local 38 in a twenty-two-week strike that called attention to conditions as bleak as those she remembered from twenty years earlier. “I threw myself into this with my former vigor, energy and devotion. . . . Every morning at 7 o’clock I was already on the picket line, never had my meals on time and never did go to bed before one o’clock.” The strike ultimately failed, but it sparked a series of organizing drives that breathed new life into the ILGWU. Cohn felt that she had demonstrated her loyalty and willingness to do whatever it took to rebuild the union.78

When David Dubinsky became president of the ILGWU in 1932, Cohn hoped that her troubles with the union leadership had come to an end. She wrote him a long letter recalling her quarter century of service to the union and detailing a series of misunderstandings she believed were to blame for her troubled relationship with his predecessor.

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