Keith Eickman, the ‘Old Left’ and the union

Edited by Harvey Schwartz,
Curator, ILWU Oral History Collection

KEITH EICKMAN

I was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in October 1913. My parents got divorced, and I usually stayed with my mother, but in 1930 I came to San Francisco to live with my father. I’ve been here most of my life since then. I went to Mission High School in the City my last two years and graduated in 1932, right in the middle of the Great Depression. Millions of people were unemployed. My father worked for the Pacific Gas and Electric Company. He never lost his job, but his pay was reduced. It took me two years to get work myself. I finally got a job in 1934 running a Burroughs bookkeeping machine at the Rosenberg Dried Fruit Company in Santa Clara, California.

With so many people out of work I was convinced there was something wrong with the system. I was looking for something that would give me answers to the problems of society and life. Then I met these young people at a night school in San Jose. They were members of the Young Communist League (YCL) in Santa Clara County. The YCL was the junior section of the American Communist Party (CP). I recall being impressed with the YCL slogan, “Life with a purpose.”

I joined the YCL in January 1936 and became quite active. There were some romantic tendencies about the YCL. I was joining an organization that was against the capitalist system. The Communists wanted to replace capitalism with socialism, which promised to divide the wealth of society more fairly.

We were really the most sectarian group in the world. We sang revolutionary songs, like [singing] “Fly higher and higher and higher, our symbol is the Soviet Star.” This I thought was marvelous—I liked the songs, I liked to sing and I liked the people. Our attitude toward the U.S. was contemptuous, even toward the good things about it. We were sectarian in that sense.

Through YCL I got involved with the organization of Santa Clara County’s cannery workers. Then a drive started to organize the dried fruit workers in the Rosenberg plant into the militant new United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), CIO. UCAPAWA was set up by the CIO in 1937. This was when the AFL and the CIO were split and were fierce competitors.

As an office clerk at Rosenberg I was not a member of the plant bargaining unit. Still, armed with the virtue of my beliefs, I announced to everyone in the plant that the production workers should join the CIO rather than stay in the conservative AFL affiliate that then represented them. This was not received by the employer with great enthusiasm.

The workers in the plant weren’t in a position to support me. But I was young and brash and thought I possessed the wisdom of the world. I was going to pass on all of my information to these lucky people. Well, they did not join the CIO, but remained in the AFL. Subsequently they did become part of the ILWU-CIO in Santa Clara County, but that was a few years later.

Eventually Rosenberg laid me off. They said it was for lack of work. Unemployment insurance had just come in, so I ran out my unemployment. There were no jobs, but I wasn’t looking for a job very strenuously because of the excitement of being active in the YCL. We did all kinds of things that seemed very important, like going to meetings every night.

Then I got hired under the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). I was given various WPA jobs around San Jose. Some were pretty stupid, but they did give you enough to live on and you could survive. Once I worked in the Stanford University labs counting fish scales. Apparently this determined some factors about the fish, but I can’t remember what.

I quit one WPA job to attend the 1939 American Youth Congress (AYC) in New York. The YCL in Santa Clara had formed a local Youth Council and I became the secretary and a delegate to the AYC. The AYC was not a revolutionary organization. It was just trying to improve conditions for young people so they could go to school and get jobs. It had a certain amount of influence in the United States until World War II. Attending the AYC meeting, I think, shows how I always did work of a broader nature than just being a member of the YCL.

That is, I always tried to work with other people. I wanted social betterment for it own sake, but also I had the idea that by doing this we really were developing some concept of the revolution. I thought the revolution was just around the corner. I remember a friend who said, “You know what? The revolution is going to be within two weeks.” We were very young at the time. But I was always very cautious in my analysis. I said, “I don’t think so, I think it will take five years.” So I gave what you’d consider the very conservative estimate! He was the real radical. Well, the revolution didn’t happen in two weeks, and it didn’t happen in five years, either.

Although I was rather naive in my mid-20s, I did have certain questions. In 1939 the Nazi-Soviet Pact caused me some anguish. That was when the Russian Communists signed a non-aggression treaty with Germany that allowed Hitler to start World War II without fear of Soviet interference. But I was able to overcome my anguish because I believed that the Soviet Union knew best. That is what I was told by the CP. I’d gone to confession and received the answer I wanted to hear.

In 1940 I went to work for Westinghouse in San Francisco as a Burroughs operator. But I really didn’t like office work. In August 1941 I decided to get into the warehouse industry, where they were hiring. The United States wasn’t in World War II yet, but the work situation was improving because of increased defense spending. In the building where I was employed there were some Local 6 members.

They were making more money than I was as a Burroughs operator. I thought, “This is ridiculous.” I quit my job, went down to the hiring hall on Clay Street and got on at Zellerbach Paper Company.

In those days the warehouse industry was not mechanized at all. Zellerbach had enormous cartons of paper, 36 by 42 inches, and they weighed an awful lot. Everything had to be stacked on the floor, but there were no mechanical contrivances to lift those cartons up. So you’d build a pyramid. You’d start at the bottom and lay it over until you got to the top. The only way you had of moving anything around was to use a little four-wheeler. There were no forklifts or electrical devices of any kind.

When I went to work at Zellerbach, they put me with one of these old Italians who was built like a moose. Local 6 had a lot of Italian workers then. This man was very strong and I wasn’t. I got on one end of this cart and he got on the other. The next thing I knew I was flying with the carton. So they put me on something I could do. It was all heavy stuff, but it wasn’t this 150 to 200 pounds.

I became active in Local 6 immediately. Joe Orlando was the steward, but the job didn’t mean that much to him. Of course, I was just panting to be steward. Joe could see it. It wasn’t any big political or personal issue with him. In 1942 he just said, “Why don’t you be steward?” Everyone else agreed. So I became the steward and I practically reached glory. I was elected secretary of the Local 6 stewards’ council in 1943, but the war cut that career short. One month later I was drafted. I served in England, France, Belgium and Germany in an Army railway battalion. In June 1946 I got discharged.

Shortly after the war I became a member of the regular CP. When I got out of the Army, the union sent me to the California Labor School (CLS). The CLS was an institution in San Francisco which was close to the Party. It had a trade union program. I got something out of the classes and then went back to work at Zellerbach as the steward.

A number of the leaders of Local 6 were also members of the CP. Normally there wasn’t any basic disagreement over what the Party and the union members wanted, but the Wallace presidential campaign of 1948 was different. Henry Wallace had been vice-president under Franklin Roosevelt. Now he was running as a third-party candidate on the Progressive Party ticket with Communist support. This was the election where Harry Truman, the Democratic president, beat Thomas Dewey, the heavily favored Republican. Wallace called for peace with the Soviet Union instead of a Cold War.

In Local 6 we passed a resolution in support of Wallace. It was not accepted whole-heartedly, but it was done. I was gung-ho for supporting Wallace myself because I thought the American people wanted a third party. Only afterwards did I realize that although there were lots of people at Wallace rallies in Northern California, in respect to the whole population, there weren’t that many. When the actual vote came and Wallace did poorly, I was enormously surprised.

As the steward at Zellerbach I used to bug people an awful lot about Wallace. The day before the election I went around to everyone in the plant and said, “Tomorrow you’re all going to go out and vote for Wallace.” A bunch of workers were sitting there. I guess by then they were fed up with my enthusiasm and my insistence that I knew what they were going to do. One of the old Italian men said, “You’re going to vote for Wallace. We’re going to vote for Truman.” I said, “But Local 6 has endorsed Wallace and you’re obligated to support the position of the local.” He said, “Fuck the local and fuck Wallace. We’re going to vote for Truman. Don’t bother us anymore.”

I’ve had a lot of lessons in my life, but that was one of the most devastating things that ever happened to me. I really thought all the people in that plant were going to vote for Wallace because I wanted to believe it. After that I began to examine everything I was doing in regard to political issues and my relationship with people. I think I really began to grow up from that time onward.

In 1949 we had our famous warehouse strike in San Francisco that lasted over 100 days. By then I had been elected chairman of the stewards’ council. During the strike I was secretary of the strike committee. Those of us who were in the CP made some mistakes in that strike. One of them is that we made the People’s World (PW), the CP newspaper, the official organ of the union.

This was a mistake because the majority of the members of the union didn’t read the PW and didn’t want to read the PW. I know because I used to sell the PW, and the number of papers you could sell at meetings was very, very small. We brought the PW around on the picket lines, too. The members would throw them in the garbage can. They didn’t want the strike to have some political aspect to it.

There was a certain amount of antagonism among some of the members of the union over the PW. That, plus the endorsement of Wallace, laid the basis for a group that was organizing for the Teamsters union to try to take over Local 6. Three or four Local 6 business agents in the West Bay (San Francisco) went over to the Teamsters and set up this rival Teamsters Local 12. This was close to when the CIO purged the ILWU, too, and another little group emerged in Local 6 that wanted a CIO takeover.

We did lose some members to the Teamsters, but the primary problem was that there was constant fighting within the local. It was like a civil war. After the Korean War started in 1950, some people would whip up hysteria and anti-communist sentiment at meetings. When anyone who was considered a Communist got up to speak, they would chant, “Communist! Communist! Communist!” The local was being torn apart. It survived, but after this the role of the CP within the union disintegrated, or at least diminished. The CP just didn’t have the same influence within the local anymore.

I stayed in the CP until I was expelled in 1955 on the grounds of “white chauvinism.” At the very time that Joe McCarthy was carrying on outside the Party, there was a tremendous purge within the CP. They purged anyone who said anything that could possibly be considered the slightest bit questionable. It became a hysteria within the CP. I had an argument on the floor of the stewards’ council with a Black Local 6 leader who is still one of my friends. The motion we were considering was not that important, but the Party leaders felt this was an example of white chauvinism and they expelled me.

They probably did me a favor. I am extraordinarily devoted to concepts and organizations. It would have been difficult for me to voluntarily separate myself from the CP because of my history within it, my background and the people I knew, even after Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations of “the crimes of the Stalin era” in 1956. But they took the decision out of my hands.

Local 6’s opposition to the Teamsters continued into the mid-1950s. This was not doing us any good. We were spending too much blasting the Teamsters, and they were blasting us. You don’t really build an organization on negative action like that. Then Louis Goldblatt, the ILWU International secretary-treasurer, started the concept of the Teamsters and the ILWU working together in Northern California warehouse negotiations. This was a wise and sensible decision that helped both of us from the latter 1950s onward.

In the mid-1950s I remained very active in the stewards’ council and on negotiating committees. I ran for business agent in late 1957, won a close race and ended up serving from 1958 to 1970. Those years included a lot of the Vietnam War, which the union opposed. At the same time we supported the battle for integration. I was never the big hero, but I played my part in those activities.

I became Local 6 secretary-treasurer in 1970 and was unopposed for re-election three times. But when I ran for president in 1977 the CP put every effort they possibly could into backing their own candidate against me. Evidently it was important to the Party to have enough influence to gain the presidency of Local 6. Yet I got 51 percent of the vote and won against three other candidates.

Understand that I don’t want to indicate in any way that I regret my period in the CP. It had an important impact on my life. The Party gave me an understanding of the class relationship of society. It gave me a political attitude that made me different from any of the officers in the union who didn’t have that background. I don’t think they understood politics to the same degree. I would not want to belong to the CP now because I don’t want to belong to an organization in which the decisions are all made from above. Still, my life in the Party laid the basis for whatever role I played in Local 6.