Valerie Taylor and the ILWU Federated Auxiliaries
The Dispatcher, March 1999
Edited by Harvey Schwartz
VALERIE TAYLOR
I was born Valerie Wyatt in Morton, Wash. in 1913. My father was working as a logger back in those days around Aberdeen and the Grays Harbor area. The bosses then always had the philosophy, “Well, if you don’t like it, if you don’t roll out, you can roll ’em up,” you know, and get out. That kind of thing I remember my dad talking about.
Right after World War I, I can also remember my folks talking about the Wesley Everest killing that took place in Centralia, Wash. Everest was an Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) military veteran who was brutally murdered by vigilantes.
We moved to North Bend, Oregon in 1923. After we came down here, my dad went into carpentry and joined the Carpenters Union. In the early 1930s he belonged to the Unemployed Council. That was an organization of people who were trying to figure out ways to get better jobs.
My parents had a large family. I’ve always had lots of brothers, sisters, nephews and other relatives living around here. My brothers worked in the woods. Later on they went longshoring and became ILWU Local 12 members.
I got out of high school in 1934, the year the big strike was on. It seemed like every radio program would have things about the strike, how it was coming along and then finally wound up a general strike in San Francisco that just about shut everything down. I thought that was pretty good cooperation of all of organized labor. My family and our friends were all on the side of the working people. We followed what was going on and we knew the longshoremen were right.
About every evening the family and our friends would gather around our house and talk politics. These were the Depression years when no one hardly had any work, and we had lots of time to think about these things. We read all about Harry Bridges and heard about him on the radio.
This is all when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. I remember one evening when a bunch of us were sitting there playing cards and talking politics. My nephew was about five years old. He was standing around the table. Pretty soon he says, “I know who the president is.” So somebody says, “Well, who?” He says, “Harry Bridges!”
Of course, we did feel the Depression. When I was going to high school a lot of us cut out cardboard and put it in the bottom of our worn shoes. Then my dad would cut leather out and put some hack soles on or heels or whatever we needed. We lived over on Maple Street and had a big house there, but we couldn’t pay our taxes, so we lost the house and moved into a houseboat and lived down on the bay.
Still, our family didn’t go hungry. We always put in a little garden, and the guys did a lot of hunting, so we had venison. We’d get clams and crabs, and we’d fish for perch. We’d go out across the bay in rowboats. We never had outboard motors, but after you got a little bill in your pocket you could buy a rower.
We were a pretty close-knit family so there were some good times. My sister and her husband lived close by. We didn’t need to call on too many outsiders for a hand of pinochle. We had it right there all the time. But we were conscious of other people going hungry. We felt we were lucky living more or less out in the country instead of being in a big city.
My brother, Ronald Wyatt, his wife, Norma, who worked with me as an officer in the ILWU Federated Auxiliaries in later years, and I were in the Workers Alliance about 1936, ’37. I think my sister, Kate Skinner, and her husband, Jasper, were members too. There were monthly meetings and we had dues. We used to meet in the old Peter Loggie Building.
The Workers Alliance was supposed to be for those people who didn’t have a job. Some members were working on low-paid New Deal Works Progress Administration (WPA) jobs and thought they weren’t getting enough wages for cutting trails, building bridges, and working out in the woods. I didn’t get out on those jobs, but we felt they weren’t getting a fair shake, so we held a demonstration.
Around 1937 someone said, “Why don’t you get into the CIO International Woodworkers of America (IWA) Auxiliary?” I could because of my connections with my brothers working in the woods. So I joined the IWA Auxiliary, and from that I became a delegate to the old Coos Bay Area Industrial Union Council, CIO.
We had everybody on the CIO Council, including the fishermen, the electrical workers and even representative of the Workers Alliance. The first thing they gave me was a job in the Council as a treasurer. Later on I was elected Secretary of the Council. I served in that role for several years.
In 1939 there was a ship in port to load scrap iron bound for Japan. The Japanese military wanted to use the scrap iron to kill the Chinese. My family, friends, and some IWA people got word that it might be a good idea to have a picket line on that ship. I didn’t think the idea up, but I went along with it. The more forward leaders in ILWU Local 12 supported us.
The guy who had the scrap iron wanted to see it loaded, of course. He got me arguing. He was about ready to slug one of our men, and I said, “Oh, here come the cops!” So this guy dropped everything and took off.
When World War II started my husband, Forrest Taylor, went into the service. I took aircraft training in Coos Bay to become a riveter. Then I went to Portland to work in an aircraft company on the waterfront up there. My partner was actually named Rosie. She was a real little old riveter too. We worked together quite a bit. So, yes, we really were Rosie the Riveters.
We needed someone for Machinists Union shop steward who we thought would be effective. It seemed like I wasn’t too afraid to speak out back in those days, so I became shop steward and a delegate to the AFL Central Labor Council. Boy, sitting there with some of those old AFL conservatives, it was really quite an experience. But I managed to get by all right. Then I was elected as one of three women to the Tri-State Convention of the Machinists.
When I first joined the Machinists Union you took an oath that said, “I will not knowingly advocate for membership in this organization any other than a competent White person.” Now wasn’t that cute! It wasn’t very long before we got rid of that thing. Imagine, we had all kinds of people working in the aircraft plant. One of the women, who was one of the inspectors of parts, was Chinese. So we pointed that out, and there was hardly any fight over getting rid of the clause.
I was also one of the ones who sold war bonds. That was the thing to do. I think I came out with second prize or something like that. I won a one-hundred-dollar war bond. I still have a poster with big letters in there that says, “That’s to defeat Hitler.”
A few years after the war, in 1947, I went to the ILWU convention held in San Francisco. My husband Forrest was a member of ILWU Local 12. The Federated Auxiliaries used to have their convention at the same time as the regular ILWU convention, so we had a meeting. I was the delegate from North Bend ILWU Auxiliary No. 1. As a result of that first meeting—it was my first Federated Auxiliaries convention, but the· third one that had been held since 1941—I became Oregon Vice-President.
Then in 1949 I was elected. President of the ILWU Federated Auxiliaries. I held that job for 24 years. The business of the Auxiliary was that once the union came up with a program, we tried to carry out those policies. After I got to be the president of the Auxiliary I attended every ILWU convention so that I would know what the ILWU policy was and I’d be sure that the rest of us carried it out at the Auxiliary convention.
When I first went down to the Federated Auxiliaries convention in 1947, I really wasn’t looking for any job. I thought it wouldn’t be so interesting working with women, but I soon found out differently. The women’s thinking was just the same as the guys. I thought it was a good program that the ILWU was proposing. Then I found out that it took all of us putting our heads together to figure out how we 1could best carry the program out. So it was interesting working with women.
The women could do a lot of things that the men couldn’t. The men were talking wages, hours and conditions, but the women could lend support in many different ways. I think probably we did more letter writing to our congressmen than to the president. We were constantly bombarding Washington with letters from the perspective of the policy of the ILWU.
We would always go back in the kitchen, of course, serving. That was important sometimes too, like at meetings where the guys didn’t have to recess to go out and eat. We figured that helped some. But I felt that we should have more than just sewing circles. That went along with it, but that wasn’t the predominate thing. We were most concerned, most all of ’em, with frame-up cases and things like that that we wrote about. We were on a lot of picket lines, too.
Our North Bend Auxiliary had public meetings in the Local 12 Longshore Hall to support various people involved in legal cases, and we took up collections and circulated petitions for a great many causes. Some of our members circulated a petition for Angela Davis, the famous American Communist Party activist who was tried around 1970.
The auxiliary also did various work in the community like supporting bloodmobile drives, registering voters, and helping with just an endless amount of things. Whatever kind of community work there was, why, we were usually into it. I think we were pretty highly respected for these activities, too. I even worked to help Henry Hansen of Local 12 on the petitions to get a community college here, and we’re proud of that. So we weren’t just out in left field all the time.
It was still in the 1940s that some of us helped organize a big mill near Coos Bay. I was interested in seeing that the leaflets the Woodworkers were putting out were being distributed. So I volunteered to help. I went out to the logging camps, too, with some of the organizers.
In ’50 I ran for the Oregon State legislature on the Democratic Party ticket. It was mostly union people who suggested that we run somebody. I supported the Progressive Party ticket, too. The Progressive Party opposed the coming of the Cold War and put up Henry Wallace for president. The longshoremen sponsored Wallace when he came to our community. I didn’t have much of an idea that I’d win my election bid, but we just thought we needed somebody out there to put programs before the people to give them some kind of a choice.
In 1950, when Bridges got stuck in the can for opposing the Korean War, I wrote a letter in support of him. It was a group decision of the Auxiliary to write to the president that we thought the war was immoral. I got put on the carpet by the rightwing faction’s leader in Local 12. The local was split right down the middle then. But I only got into difficulty that one time. Usually we got along pretty good.
Around 1950 some people started calling us “reds,” but that was something you had to kind of get used to, because if you let that stop you, you wouldn’t be doing anything. The FBI knocked on your door every few months, it seemed like, but we never got very friendly with them. I did have to go before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Seattle.
It’s the same like I thought about Harry Bridges: If that man had been just an ordinary worker down in the hold of a ship and never said anything, there would have been no attempt to deport the guy. We felt that we were kind of getting the same kind of flak. And, my God, you can’t let that stop you.
Once an Immigration officer came to our house and knocked on our door. He wanted information about several people. Of course, I didn’t give him any. I finally wound up telling him, ”You’ve got a hell of a job to perform. I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” I thought, “He must be one of those SOB kind of guys, trying to get information about these poor people that’s trying to make a living.”
The name left-winger stayed attached to me around this area, I think, because I was on all the picket lines. Whenever I’m around town I still join ’em. Not long ago we were on one at a clothing store in Coos Bay called the Hub. We walked that one for days. So the strike got over and I met the owner one day on the street. I said, “Oh, I’m going into your store to get myself a new pair of shoes. I wore mine out walking your picket line!” He couldn’t do anything but laugh.
Somebody has to do these things. I certainly was never by myself. We never were a large organization in North Bend, probably 30 or 40 gals in the auxiliary, but that’s not too bad. Still, my father used to say, “They’ll probably take you out to the nearest tree and hang you some day.” He was just kidding, of course.
I just did what I thought was necessary. I didn’t feel like I was doing anything more advanced than anybody else, but somebody had to speak out. What’s that saying about being ashamed to die if you haven’t done some good for humanity or some such thing like that? I kept that in the back of my mind. Working to make this a better world for having lived in it has been my philosophy. All my life it seems like I’ve been circulating some sort of a petition. My sister says, “You’re going to die with a petition in your hand.” I’m circulating one right now.