Red Seas

Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica

Gerald Horne

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780814744543
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études afro-américaines

During the heyday of the U.S. and international labor movements in the 1930s and 1940s, Ferdinand Smith, the Jamaican-born co-founder and second-in-command of the National Maritime Union (NMU), stands out as one of the most—if not the most—powerful black labor leaders in the United States. Smith's active membership in the Communist Party, however, coupled with his bold labor radicalism and shaky immigration status, brought him under continual surveillance by U.S. authorities, especially during the Red Scare in the 1950s. Smith was eventually deported to his homeland of Jamaica, where he continued his radical labor and political organizing until his death in 1961.

Gerald Horne draws on Smith's life to make insightful connections between labor radicalism and the Civil Rights Movement—demonstrating that the gains of the latter were propelled by the former and undermined by anticommunism. Moreover, Red Seas uncovers the little-known experiences of black sailors and their contribution to the struggle for labor and civil rights, the history of the Communist Party and its black members, and the significant dimensions of Jamaican labor and political radicalism.

1
Sailing the Red Seas

IN 1875 the marine engineers formalized their Cleveland-based fraternal lodge into a labor union, the Marine Engineers’ Beneficial Association. This was quickly followed by the formation of the Lake Seamen’s Association, thereby launching trade unionism among sailors. Early on sailors displayed the militancy that NMU and Ferdinand Smith were to exemplify. The Coast Seamen’s Union, for example, affiliated with the International Workingmen’s Association, a branch of Karl Marx’s First International, and was run by an Advisory Committee made up of IWA members, in accordance with CSU’s constitution. In July 1891, the seafarer Andrew Furuseth persuaded the various sailors’ unions to combine into the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, which was a precursor to the International Seamen’s Union (which joined the American Federation of Labor in 1894). Thus began a new stage of trade unionism at sea.¹

Eight years later the marine firemen, oilers, watertenders, and wipers’ union was formed to represent the interests of the unlicensed workers in a ship’s engine rooms.² As labor was combining, so was capital—the two trends were related. In 1902, the year he founded U.S. Steel, J. P. Morgan also “set out to gain control of liner shipping in the North Atlantic. He created a new shipping company, the International Mercantile Marine (IMM),” which at its zenith “owned 136 ships, or about one-third of all vessels engaged in foreign trade.” These “purchases gave Morgan the largest privately owned commercial fleet in the world, one which was equal in tonnage to the entire French merchant marine.... At that stage only Cunard, the dominant Atlantic carrier, lay outside Morgan’s control.” This was the formidable foe faced by sailors seeking to unionize.³

As the SUP saw it, there was yet another cloud hovering over the horizon, namely, immigrant Chinese men whom it saw as low-wage competitors for jobs that belonged properly to men of European descent. Andrew Furuseth, the first major leader of sailors in the United States, “worked to renew the Chinese Exclusion Act and to extend it to all Orientals.” Reflecting the prevailing doctrines of white supremacy, “one of his chief arguments... was always that, unless white men were brought back to the sea, the yellow race would win mastery of the sea, and, with it, mastery of the world.” Fortunately, not all sailors responded to such odious appeals. In 1913 Spanish-speaking firemen left Furuseth’s union to join the IWW; the strength of the IWW was underscored when it “gained complete control of the port of New Orleans, where it conducted an unsuccessful strike in 1913.”⁴

But Furuseth’s men had far more clout in Washington than either the Chinese or the IWW seamen. In 1915 the “Seamen’s (LaFollette) Act halted shipping of Chinese crews by requiring that 75 percent of the members of any ship’s department be able to understand English.”⁵ Such discriminatory language requirements did, however, create opportunities for English-speaking seafarers like Smith, especially since Furuseth “never publicly attacked the Negro race,” although Negroes were not welcomed into his union either.⁶ Indeed, “checkerboarding” or the integration of black workers into white crews, was not permitted, and for decades blacks were excluded from the West Coast unions.⁷

Furuseth’s union’s capitulation to “racial chauvinism,” showed that it was not equipped to cope with the changing dynamics of the maritime industry, which created an enormous opening for the more “racially” sensitive Communists. When Smith entered the maritime industry,⁸ “no Black man was assigned as a sailor, an engineer, a mechanic, carpenter, an electrician, radio operator or an officer—no matter what the Black worker’s qualifications might be. A Black worker could only work as a cook, messman, waiter or elsewhere in the steward’s department.”⁹ But big changes were afoot in the industry. By the time World War I came to a close, “union membership had grown to 117,000, seamen’s wages had risen to $85 per month and seamen serving on the deck for the first time achieved an eight hour workday.”¹⁰ As the United States traded with both sides during the conflict, then confronted Germany for its alleged aggression against nonmilitary ships, the maritime industry endured a roller-coaster ride of advance and retreat that morphed into a lingering recession throughout the 1920s. Given what the capitalist economy could absorb at the time, there were simply too many ships and too many sailors—the global economy was slowing down and the need for ships and sailors shrank accordingly. The resultant shakeout in the industry left numerous seafarers in difficult financial straits.¹¹ After several failed strikes during this tumultuous decade, the membership of the International Seamen’s Union plummeted from more than 100,000 to “fewer than 3000 by 1929.”¹²

Yet by 1934, 293,000 people were involved in foreign or interstate shipping. Of this total, 145,000 were in foreign, coastal, or intercoastal commerce, 25,000 on the Great Lakes, and 15,000 on inland waterways. This was a major opportunity for radical trade union organizers.¹³ And when a “suddenly awakened Congress . . . passed the ‘Merchant Marine Act of 1936’” which, inter alia, “closed our coastal, intercoastal routes and those to Hawaii, Porto Rico and Alaska to all but American ships,” domestic shipbuilding and the maritime industry generally both received a boost.¹⁴

Moved by this upturn in the industry and less concerned that militancy would sink the industry further into debt, in 1936 the ISU went on strike against the Pacific Coast employers. It restricted the strike to the West Coast as a matter of tactics, avoiding overextension and perhaps an unwelcome counterreaction by the employers. A group of East Coast sailors—with Ferdinand Smith in the leadership—nonetheless joined in a sympathy strike both to back their comrades out west and to obtain a better contract for themselves, as their wages often lagged behind those of their Pacific counterparts. They wanted to establish a union-controlled hiring hall and to get rid of the “continuous discharge book,” which they saw as a means of compelling a seafarer to carry on his person evidence that would allow him to be “blacklisted.” They also wanted more safety at sea and improved working conditions.¹⁵ But “the strike . . . formally ended on January 24, 1937. It gained nothing, in increased wages or improved working conditions,” wrote Philip Taft, “but the leaders of the walkout boasted that it had discredited the old union officials. The insurgent leaders sought to take over the name of the International Seamen’s Union for the new union they were forming but when they were prevented by the courts, they called themselves the National Maritime Union of America.”¹⁶

Meanwhile the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was creating a new chapter in labor history. The newly formed NMU demanded and won representational elections and by 1938 was the exclusive bargaining agent for many of the fifty-two Atlantic steamship companies. The ISU remnant became the Seafarers International Union (SIU) representing workers on the Gulf Coast while in the west, the ISU “dissolved into three separate unions that represented unlicensed personnel.” While unions in the steel and auto industries were growing in strength, in the maritime industry “competing unions continued to fight each other.”¹⁷

Communist patriarch William Z. Foster, a former sailor himself, was blunt: “Seamen probably know more about imperialism than any other group of workers.... They sail the ships that carry the fruits of imperialist exploitation. They sail the ships that carry the guns and men that are needed to subjugate other peoples for imperialist exploitation.”¹⁸ Another radical put it this way: “Seamen built the capitalist world; it is natural they should also destroy it.”¹⁹ Communists played a dominant role in the NMU.²⁰ The confined setting, the poor working conditions, the attenuated effect of the church and other mediating institutions, the exposure to foreign lands and ideas—all this and more contributed to the growing impact of the Communist Party among sailors.

The Reds were not alone in seeking to cater to sailors. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organized a Marine Transport Workers Union. A. Philip Randolph’s journal, The Messenger, described its Philadelphia branch as exemplifying the “ability of white and black people to work, live and conduct their common affairs side by side.” During this era of virulent Jim Crow, at MTWU social affairs, “the workers also mingle, fraternize, dance, eat and play together.”²¹

Despite the longstanding reputation of maritime workers for militancy and radical consciousness—especially under the leadership of the IWW—the Communist Party²² “paid little attention to the waterfront” in the 1920s as Smith was moving to join their ranks. However, in 1926 the party formed “International Seamen’s Clubs” in several port cities in the United States and around the world. These clubs played a social and educational role, “providing facilities for reading, recreation and dining.”²³

The Trade Unity Educational League (TUEL), which had close ties to the Communist Party, was cooperating with the IWW in “various fields” in 1926. The IWW was suffering “disintegration . . . losing their headquarters”—and many members at this time.²⁴ This presented an opportunity for the youthful Communist Party—USA, though not without a problem. For one thing the Communists had been slow to organize among the militant sailors because the leaders at the highest levels of the party felt that it was almost impossible to have rank and file democracy in a union when the membership was scattered at sea. Sailors had a justifiable reputation for rowdiness and dissolute living—having a sweetheart in every port was no exaggeration. There was something about those who sailed the seven seas that inclined them toward the rambunctious. Despite the notable successes of Reds in organizing sailors, this factor seems to have been stronger than they anticipated. Moreover, according to one Red analysis, there was the “beach comber element, the type which is known as the ‘lumpen proletariat’ and hall loafers” who “conduct affairs and usually conform to the wishes of whatever officialdom dominates. Organizing a left wing and keeping it functioning under such circumstances is a puzzle which we have been unable to solve.”

Then there were the anarchists among the seafarers, who had begun “organized violence slugging our left wingers in the Manhattan Branch’s meeting.” Not all of them were domestic. There were some “French anarchists of recent arrival in America,” who—horror of all horrors—“fought . . . against the Soviet power” in the USSR.²⁵ Before the advent of the NMU, hiring was “done by ‘shapeup,’” for example, the boss just “points his finger at men he wanted or via ‘crimps’—proprietors of boarding houses who supplied crews to the shipping companies and one way or another did the seamen out of practically all their wages.”²⁶ The setup was unlikely to attract choirboys and boy scouts.

However, the Communists were able to overcome these barriers. The anarchists were in a slow and steady decline in the United States that the boost of the Spanish Civil War could not arrest. The Depression convinced a critical mass of sailors that their lives could only improve with organization. Strong and centralized leadership dealt with the problem presented by the sailors’ transience.

The Communists’ antiracism—which was so contrary to the general sentiment in the United States—made them especially appealing to Negroes. This did not escape the attention of the New York Times, which noted in 1926, “Dr. Du Bois . . . thinks it is up to white people of America to treat the Negroes better in order to keep them out of the Communist ranks.”²⁷ Yet better treatment would have implied supporting “racial equality” and thus violating a reigning taboo in the United States.

Although the Communists had their own problems, these may not have repelled Negroes. Reds were ostracized by a broad spectrum of people—but so were Negroes, so this was hardly an obstacle to their recruiting Negroes in a place like Harlem. Even Red critiques of would-be allies (for example, the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]), before the “popular front” was proclaimed in the mid-1930s, did not deter Negroes. Though the Communist Party was criticized for sectarianism when it organized unions independent of the mainstream American Federation of Labor, this facilitated the inclusion of Negro workers, which the federation generally ignored.²⁸

Not concentrating on the AFL did encourage the Communist Party to focus more intently on other constituencies, such as Negroes. Unavoidably, this brought the Reds into contact with the Universal Negro Improvement Association—Marcus Garvey’s organization—which included many West Indians within its ranks. By the mid-1920s, Garvey was on the fast track to being deported and his organization was splintering. The Communist Party sought to work with an “anti-Garvey faction” in the UNIA, which contained “the best and the proletarian elements. New York is the stronghold of this mass movement.”²⁹ Shipping was the stronghold of the Garvey movement, as its “Black Star Line” was a symbol of repatriation and a vehicle for commerce. But because Garvey’s ships, such as the Yarmouth, were dependent on a “white chief engineer” and a...