“Thought Crime in the Land of the Free”
By John Hayakawa Torok
Lecture, April 6, 2026, for: Asian Americans and the Cold War, 1945-1965, UC Berkeley.
Professor Harvey Dong, Asian American Studies 23, Asian American History, 50 Birge Hall
Guest Speakers: John Hayakawa Torok, Joyce Xi, L. Ling-chi Wang.
“Not so long ago, China was deemed an inferior civilization, unfit for Western-style democracy and modernity. Then with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, China became represented as a faithful ally, only to be demonized as ‘Red China’ during the Cold War era …” Jack Tchen, Foreword, Him Mark Lai, Autobiography of a Chinese American Historian.
In a 1947 address to Congress, President Harry Truman requested $400 million for military and economic assistance to Turkey and Greece against, respectively, Soviet influence in Turkey, and a communist insurgency against the Greek monarchy. This after Britain withdrew its aid. Truman said: “The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms.” Truman further said: “It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities and outside pressures.” The postwar United States government feared a domino effect.
The foreign policy strategy of containment was a coordinated diplomatic, military, and foreign aid effort to prevent territorial expansion by the international communist alliance. At the president’s invitation in 1946 Winston Churchill prefigured the policy in his “The Sinews of Peace” statement at Fulton, Missouri. This talk was Churchill’s famous “Iron Curtain” speech. Churchill argued that “English-speaking peoples” must show up to contain Soviet expansionism in Europe and the Middle East. The “Truman Doctrine” was the touchstone of U.S. foreign policy for the next forty-five years. In Asia the US applied the containment policy in Vietnam, Iran, and Korea and beyond. After the Berlin Wall fell and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) dissolved the policy was superseded.
The binary at the core of the Cold War was a “freedom” versus “slavery” rhetoric. “Communist” countries – the East – were seen as totalitarian police states with their peoples lacking freedom and enslaved by a bogus ideology. “Free world” allied countries, even those with poor records on civil liberties, by contrast, were called authoritarian. In their foreign relations posture, Eastern socialist countries advanced international peace as a counterpoint to the “freedom” narratives of the West.
While it may have been a “Cold War” in Europe and with Russia, in Asia it was anything but “cold.” After 35 years of imperialist Japanese occupation, the end of World War Two saw the division of Korea into two at the 53rd parallel. The Soviet and American occupiers proceeded to establish client states respectively in North and South Korea.
On June 25, 1950 the North’s Korean People’s Army invaded the South. Truman ordered US forces to aid South Korea and then secured United Nations support. He stated it was a “police action.” Ninety percent (90%) of military participants on the allied side were American. In October “volunteers” from the People’s Republic of China entered the fray. By the time of the 1953 armistice some one million military personnel and three million civilians had died. A peace agreement has yet to be concluded on the Korean peninsula.
We turn now to a U.S. domestic application of the strategy of containment. In American Chinatowns the context for the 1950s Chinese immigration policy enforcement and ideological regulation prosecutions was: (1) the Chinese revolution, the Korean War, and their aftermath; and (2) countersubversion and counterinsurgency against perceived communists throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
From the 1940s the U.S. created administrative and legislative structures to eliminate “communism” from American life. This domestic crusade was named McCarthyism. However, the anti-subversive McCarthy congressional hearings were just the tip of the iceberg of what may be denominated the domestic strategy of containment.
Spearheaded by the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and his political allies, this domestic containment overtook federal and state legislatures and agencies. The Eisenhower administration from 1953 saw the State Department’s Security and Passport offices promoting a “Chinese Communist Infiltration” crisis. These anti-communist bureaucrats secured increased funding for, then collaborated with the INS on, their investigative activities at Hong Kong. A post-war and revolution refugee crisis emerged there after 1949.
The rhetoric used included “Who Lost China?” “Chinese Passport Fraud” “Red China” “Red Ransom Racket” “Sino-Soviet Bloc” and “Immigration Family Racket.” Eugene Moy, editor of the China Daily News (“CDN”) was called the “Number Two Chinese Communist” by media in New York. A Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) Chinese language newspaper based in the U.S. called the Chinese language CDN the “Russian Daily News.”
During the Chinese Exclusion era, Chinese migrants developed a “paper son” migration system to circumvent the racist law. After Eisenhower’s election, however, the US government feared potential Chinese communist infiltration through paper family migration. They therefore began investigating the “loyalty” of illegal Chinese migrants and Chinese Americans through what became the Chinese Confession Program.
In World War Two the United States government racially associated Japanese Americans with Imperial Japan. In the 1950s Chinese investigations, Chinese American were racially associated by that same government with “Red China.” Japanese Americans received no individualized determinations before en masse incarceration in the wartime inland U.S. concentration camps. In the 1950s Chinese Americans feared the same might happen to them. “To Save China, To Save Ourselves” was a byword among New York’s Chinese laundry workers who favored resistance to Japan from the 1930s. The US government’s emphasis was loyalty to America. By the mid-1950s Chinese investigations to expose and deport “subversives” was the program.
My dissertation argues that the 1955 Chinese Investigations and the Chinese Confession Program were both (1) anti-Chinese racist and (2) ideological policing. In New York the prosecutorial approach against Chinese paper family migration yielded criminal convictions of several Chinese immigration brokers, notable among them Lau Sing Kee and Arthur Lem. The China Daily News (“CDN”) was founded in 1940 by the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance (“CHLA”). The Chinese language newspaper CDN and its editor Eugene Moy were criminally prosecuted under the Trading With the Enemy Act.
Ironically, by contrast to these two federal criminal prosecutions in New York, the San Francisco INS “Oriental Fraud Unit” secured national adoption of the legalization approach of the Chinese Confession Program they started. The original San Francisco federal prosecutorial approach was a mass subpoena to Chinatown organizations for all membership records. A Chinese community mobilization followed, and then a San Francisco federal district court quashed the subpoena as overbroad on constitutional grounds. The legalization approach of “Chinese Confession” emerged then evolved, from the small San Francisco INS “Oriental Fraud Unit” beginnings, into a transnational loyalty-security investigation of Chinese Americans as a group.
Chinese migrants thus received individualized loyalty determinations that Japanese Americans as a group had not received when they were incarcerated en masse during World War Two. This despite the fact that under a 1950 McCarran Act provision race-based mass incarceration of Chinese Americans was authorized as a matter of formal law.
The Chinese Confession Program was not benign. Ideological enforcement against China Daily News subscribers and New York CHLA members, and against the progressive Chinese American Democratic Youth League (“CADYL”) in San Francisco, illustrates this.
The Chinese language daily CDN was founded by New York’s laundrymen on July 7, 1940, the anniversary of the July 7, 1937 Marco Polo Bridge incident, a battle which marked the start of the Sino-Japanese war. This date reflected the laundry workers’ mass support for Chinese resistance to Japanese imperialism. The Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) under Chiang Kai-shek was by contrast often more interested in battling “reds” than resisting Japan. They called that “bandit suppression.”
The China Daily News case in New York, while a criminal case under the US Treasury’s foreign assets control regulations, was about ideology. The government’s prosecutorial approach showed this. The state introduced in evidence English translations of articles originally written and published in Chinese that it considered subversive. Defense lawyers argued this violated the First Amendment press freedoms. After the CDN’s conviction several New York CHLA members were deported for false claims of citizenship. Some fought to remain. Others were under FBI surveillance for some twenty years.
At sentencing the CDN’s Eugene Moy took the stand and testified:
“I am an editor, a journalist, not a businessperson. … I started in this country unlearned in both Chinese and English. I was a laundry worker and a restaurant worker. By self-denial and perseverance I educated myself in the classics of Chinese and English languages. It was then I was called to edit the China Daily News.”
In San Francisco in 1949, Him Mark Lai (1925 -2009) joined the Chinese American Democratic Youth League, or Mun Ching, a progressive youth group. He became President in 1950. He was thus in office when the Korean War broke out. Like New York’s CHLA workers, Mun Ching had previously focused on Chinese national salvation including support for Chinese resistance to Japanese imperialism. In the San Francisco Chinese community some perceived Mun Ching as communist aligned. In 1954 to shift away from politics towards educational, cultural, and social activities like tutoring Chinese immigrant students, the group changed its name to Chinese American Youth Club. In 1959 the Club closed.
Him Mark Lai studied mechanical engineering at the San Francisco Junior College, then transferred and graduated with that degree in 1947 from U.C. Berkeley. While an aspiring Historian he could see no career path for himself in that field in America then. But in 1960 he attended Instructor Stanford Lyman’s “The Oriental in America” class in U.C. Extension.
In 1953 Him Mark Lai started working for Bechtel as an engineer. He also married a Mun Ching comrade, Laura (Yuk Ying) Jung. His interest in history led him, with Laura’s support, to write and publish articles on Chinese American history starting in 1967. He went on to adjunct teach Chinese American history, and to community radio broadcasting. After 31 years at Bechtel he retired in 1984 to work full-time on researching and writing bilingual Chinese American history.
This self-taught community-based researcher and journalist is the Dean of Chinese American historians. He deposited his written and audio content, and collected Chinese American archival material, at the U.C. Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library Asian American Studies Collection. Him Mark Lai published ten books and one hundred articles on Chinese American history. Like the CDN’s Eugene Moy, Him Mark Lai was self-taught in the Chinese classics.
By the early 1960s Laura Lai, Him Mark’s spouse, got caught up in the INS Chinese paper family investigations. Almost all Mun Ching members, other than the few American-born, were investigated and stripped of their citizenship. But they were not deported. The investigation of Chinese migrants was a “pretext to harass leftists in the community.” Laura Lai was stripped of her U.S. citizenship in 1966. The government’s posture was that the original grant of citizenship to her was based on fraud. But she was granted permanent residence in 1970. Emigrants from the mainland often waited twenty years to secure their permanent status. Laura Lai was granted American citizenship again in 1974.
In sum, the Chinese investigations and Chinese confession program (1) reflected continued anti-Chinese racism in American law, and (2) functioned as ideological policing of Chinese America. With the 1965 Immigration Act a brave new world of immigration regulation and enforcement was born.
Him Mark Lai’s conception of history was materialist, an approach that the engineer found congenial. He wrote:
“It is the circumstances and the times that enable the deeds. I just happened to be at the right place at the right time to meet the demand for more information on Chinese American history.”
SOURCES:
Rachel I. Buff, “The Deportation Terror,” American Quarterly 60:3 (2008), 523-51.
Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston, 1991).
____, ed. Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-1943 (Philadelphia, 1991).
Lucie Cheng & Edna Bonacich, eds. Labor Immigration Under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States Before World War Two (Berkeley, 1984).
Roger Daniels, The Decision to Relocate Japanese Americans (Malabar, 1990).
Blanch L. Freedman, “The Loyalty-Security Program – Its Effect in Immigration and Deportation,” Lawyers Guild Review 15:4 (1955), 135-13.
Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics and Internal Security, 1946-1948 (New York, 1985) (1970).
Ann Fagan Ginger, “Political Deportations in the United States: A Study in the Enforcement Procedures, 1919- 1952,” Lawyers Guild Review 14:3 (1954), 93-127.
____, “Political Deportations, 1944-1954,” Science & Society 19:2 (1955), 134- 166.
____ & David Christiano, The Cold War Against Labor (Berkeley, MCLI Studies in Law and Social Change, No. 3, 1987) (2 vols.).
Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (Palo Alto, 2000).
____, “Gold Mountain Dreams and Paper Son Schemes: Chinese Immigration Under Exclusion,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives (1997), 40-60.
Carol Weiss King & Ann Fagan Ginger, “The McCarran Act and Immigration Laws,” Lawyer’s Guild Review 11:3 (1951), 128-141.
John Lone, dir. Paper Angels by Genny Lim (San Francisco, Kearny Street Workshop, 1982).
Stanley I. Kutler, The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War (New York, 1982).
Peter Kwong. Chinatown, N.Y.: Labor and Politics, 1930-1950 (New York, 1979).
Him Mark Lai, Autobiography of a Chinese American Historian (San Francisco, 2011).
____, “To Bring Forth a New China, To Build a Better America: The Chinese Marxist Left in America to the 1960s,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives (1992), 3-82.
____, “Unfinished Business: The Chinese Confession Program,” in, The Repeal and its Legacy (CHSA 1994 Conference Proceedings).
____, Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions (Walnut Creek, 2004).
____, Genny Lim, & Judy Yung. Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 (Chinese Culture Foundation, History of Chinese Detained on Island Project) (San Francisco, 1980).
Estelle T. Lau, Paper Families: Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese Exclusion (Durham, 2006).
Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill, 2003).
Richard Longaker, “Emergency Detention: The Generation Gap, 1950-1971,” Western Political Quarterly 27:3 (Sept. 1974), 395-408.
Alfred W. McCoy, Cold War on Five Continents: A Global History of Empire and Espionage (Chicago, 2026).
Mae M. Ngai, “Legacies of Exclusion: Illegal Chinese Immigration During the Cold War Years,” Journal of American Ethnic History 18:1 (Fall 1998), 3-35.
Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill, 1995).
Ellen Schrecker, Many Are The Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston, 1998).
____, “Immigration and Internal Security: Political Deportations During the McCarthy Era,” 60:4 Science & Society (1996-1997), 393-417
Betty Lee Sung, Mountain of Gold: The Story of the Chinese in America (New York, 1967).
Edward P. Thompson, Beyond the Cold War: A New Approach to the Arms Race and Nuclear Annihilation (New York, 1982).
John Hayakawa Torok, “‘Chinese Investigations’: Immigration Policy Enforcement in Cold War New York Chinatown, 1946-65” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Berkeley, CA. 2008).
____, “‘Interest Convergence’ and the Liberalization of Discriminatory Immigration and Naturalization Laws Affecting Asians, 1943-1965,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives (1995), 1-28.
Leti Volpp, “‘Obnoxious to Their Very Nature’: Asian Americans and Constitutional Citizenship,” Citizenship Studies 5:1 (2001), 57-71.
Renqui Yu, To Save China, To Save Ourselves: The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York (Philadelphia, 1992).
____, “Little Heard Voices: The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance and the China Daily News’ Appeal for the Repeal of Chinese Exclusion in 1943,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives (1990), 21-35.
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The VA Is a Model for Public Health Care. We Need to Protect It.
By Suzanne Gordon
For 161 years, America has taken care of veterans. It should stay that way
This story was originally published by Barn Raiser, your independent source for rural and small town news.”
Bruce Carruthers is a Vietnam veteran who served in the Army and now lives in Waynesville, North Carolina. At age 81, Carruthers could be spending more of his time with his three sons and grandchildren, traveling or focusing on the woodworking projects that he enjoys. Instead, for the last six years, he’s devoted hours each week to stop efforts to privatize the nation’s largest and only publicly funded health care system, run by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
Carruthers has a long and deep connection to the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). For 30 years, from 1974 to 2002, he worked first in VHA’s Human Resources department and then in hospital administration at hospitals like the Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center in Denver, Colorado.
Several years after his retirement, he became a VHA patient. He now drives 36 miles from his home to the Charles George VA Medical Center in Asheville, North Carolina, where, most recently, he’s received treatment for prostate cancer (most likely as result of his exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam).
“I feel I’ve gotten not only excellent but incredibly responsive care at the VA,” he says. “One of the great things about it is if I have a question, I can email my primary care provider and get a response within hours. If I need one, they make an appointment for me.”
Several weeks ago, Carruthers noticed a bluish-purple mole on his neck and wrote his physician. The doctor responded immediately with a referral to a dermatologist, who quickly booked an appointment with Carruthers. “This would never happen in the private sector, at least not in rural America. I would have had to wait months to see a dermatologist in my area of the country.”
Like so many other veterans, he values a health care system designed specifically to meet the needs of veterans. Carruthers serves as President of the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI), a think tank that focuses on stopping VA privatization. He’s also a steering committee member of the Veterans For Peace Save Our VA Campaign (SOVA), which has the same goal.
“At 81, my time on this planet is obviously limited,” he says. “But I’m dedicated to making sure veterans, especially younger vets, receive the same kind of excellent care I’ve received at the VA.”
Over the past decade, a right-wing attack on the VHA has jeopardized the continued availability of this kind of care. Today, efforts to privatize the VA now threaten the very existence of the nation’s largest health care system. (Read my previous coverage on this issue for Barn Raiser here and here.)
In this first article of a multi-part series with Barn Raiser, I want to explain just what the VHA is and what it does, not only for rural veterans but all Americans. Subsequent articles will then describe the forces who have launched this assault against the VA, how veterans and rural Americans are organizing to protect the VA, and what you can do to protect this one-of-a-kind system.
The VHA is in fact, become the nation’s only socialized medicine system—albeit one that serves a small slice of the American population. Like the United Kingdom or Scandinavian health care systems, the government owns and operates all VA health care facilities, and all VA employees are on salary. VA physicians are not paid on a fee-for-service basis but are salaried and thus have no incentive to overtreat patients because they benefit financially from delivering unnecessary treatments or procedures. For example, studies have shown that the VA is the only health care system that follows standard of care for patients with low-risk prostate cancer, which is watchful waiting. Outside of VA, men with low-risk prostate cancer are far more likely to receive unnecessary surgery or invasive radiation treatment.
Although the VA is not a classic single-payer system, it is a national health system that both pays for and provides care, which makes it far easier to innovate within the system. VA innovations are legion, including medication barcoding, the integration of mental health and primary care, and widespread use of geriatric care for VA’s many older patients. As health care reform advocates search for models of high quality, accessible and affordable health care, they don’t have to look to Canada or the U.K. or other European countries, they can find it in every state in the nation.
The nation’s only genuine health care system
Since 1811, when Congress directed the Navy to establish the Naval Home in Philadelphia, the United States has offered former service members health care services to deal with their military related injuries.
The U. S. Naval Asylum in Philadelphia was the first federal facility to provide institutional care for disabled and elderly Veterans. (Library Company of Philadelphia)
A month before the Civil War ended, on March 3, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln helped lay the foundation of what would become the Veteran’s Administration when he signed a law creating the National Asylum for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers to serve Union veterans. A day later, in his second Inaugural address, Lincoln famously pledged this care as both a literal and metaphorical means of healing the nation:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness
in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
By World War I, a variety of government agencies managed veterans’ health care and benefits. In 1930, President Herbert Hoover consolidated administration of veterans’ affairs into a single federal agency, the Veterans Administration. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan made that agency a cabinet level department, renaming it the Department of Veterans Affairs—still referred to as the VA. The Department includes the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) and Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), which run the nation’s largest health care and benefits systems.
In 1994, the VA, still reeling from its failures to adequately care for veterans who suffered during the Vietnam War (as revealed in Ron Kovic’s 1976 memoir Born on the Fourth of July, later adapted as a movie in 1989 starring Tom Cruise) got a top to bottom makeover under the leadership of its new Under Secretary for Health Kenneth W. Kizer. Kizer, in what is known as the “Kizer revolution,” transformed a system that largely delivered hospital care of variable quality into the nation’s only comprehensive, fully integrated health care system.
While many largely market driven, increasingly corporate owned hospitals and clinics call themselves “health care systems,” they largely deliver fragmented medical treatment based on a fee-for-service, pay-as-you-go system. These “health care systems” are notorious for skimping on mental health care, and almost totally ignore social determinants of health like lack of housing, employment, occupational health and safety issues or legal problems. The VHA addresses all of these issues and more.
One common misconception about the VA is that anyone who has served in the military can access its health care system and benefits. That’s not true. Eligibility depends on a service member’s discharge status, their income, or their time in a combat zone, in our post-9/11 conflicts or whether they have a proven service-connected disability. More than half of America’s 17 million veterans probably qualify for VA health care; however, the system currently serves only nine million. An estimated 2.7 million, or about one third, of enrolled veterans live in rural areas.
The VA not only provides these veterans with a wide range of medical services—everything from primary care, to surgery, to geriatric care—it also has extensive mental and behavioral health programs. Major VA medical centers almost always include a full-service nursing home and residential rehabilitation treatment programs. The VA also has Blind Rehabilitation, Spinal Cord Injury and Polytrauma Treatment programs for veterans with serious vision loss, spinal cord injuries or who have suffered multiple traumatic injuries. The VA also addresses veteran homelessness, and employment and legal problems.
In 2014, the American Journal of Public Health lauded the VHA for its serious commitment, and action to achieve, health care equity, which it defines as providing timely, high quality, personalized, safe and effective health care regardless of geography, gender, race, age, culture or sexual orientation. This commitment to equity has supported rural veterans in particular, with the VA targeting programs and research initiatives focused on solving rural health disparities.
When it comes to serving rural veterans, who comprise about 25% of the total veteran population, the VA has made a serious and sustained commitment to meet their needs. VA has established almost 788 Community Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOCs) throughout the country, which means that most are within driving distance of a VA facility. Although some veterans who live in remote rural areas have to drive farther, most rural veterans are within a 44.5 mile range of a VA clinic.
Veterans benefit not only from a network of rural VHA clinics but also from well-established pathways to VHA facilities in metropolitan areas where they can receive more specialized care. In the cases of truly long travel, the VA often helps defray transportation and lodging costs and ensures coordination of care once veterans return to their local communities. A system of Fisher Houses also provides lodging for family members of veterans getting longer term treatment. In 2006, Congress also mandated that VHA create an an Office of Rural Health to study the needs and obstacles to access of rural veterans. The ORH also has developed regional Veterans Rural Health Resource Centers to delve more deeply into how to address the health care challenges of rural veterans.
VHA’s other missions include teaching, research and emergency preparedness. The VHA’s more than 12,000 hospitals and clinics are a key training ground for many of the nation’s future doctors, nurses and other clinicians. More than 1,800, or nearly 90%, of educational institutions partner with the VHA in this $900 million-a-year program. More than 70% of the nation’s physicians have received training in the VHA.
The VA also trains many other kinds of health care professionals. It’s the single largest employer of psychologists in the United States. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), “one in five doctoral interns in psychology is training at the VA. VA also hosts more than 50 percent of APA-accredited postdoctoral training programs in psychology.” In 2022, the American Association of Medical Colleges told Congress that the VHA played a role in medical education, training and research that is “irreplaceable.”
The VHA is also the nation’s largest research institution. Only the National Institutes of Health funds more research than the VHA. The VHA developed barcoding for medication administration, the first implantable cardiac pacemaker, the nicotine patch and the first Shingles vaccine. It has assembled the largest collection of brain tissue in the world in its Biorepository Brain Bank, established the connection between concussions in football and later development of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, and its Million Veteran Program has assembled the largest genomic data bank in the world, allowing more than 600 researchers across VHA’s 80-plus projects to better understand and treat anxiety, heart disease, kidney disease, cancer, Parkinson’s Disease and other ailments.
The VHA is also mandated to address veteran homelessness. Its pioneering homeless programs, which include prevention services (Supportive Services for Veteran Families), outreach services (Health Care for Homeless Veterans and the National Call Center for Homeless Veterans), temporary housing and permanent housing services (Supportive Services for Veteran Families), have helped significantly reduce veteran homelessness as well as create models that have been emulated across the country to reduce a growing national epidemic. According to data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, veteran homelessness hit a record low in January 2024 since measurement began in 2009.
Finally, the VHA serves as backup to the civilian health care system in times of war, terrorist attacks, natural disasters and other emergencies—from pandemics and mass shootings to hurricanes, tornados and wildfires. The VHA’s medical center in Puerto Rico, for instance, was the only functioning hospital on the island during and after Hurricane Maria. And it was open to non-veterans. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, VHA facilities cared for non-veteran patients in hot spots like New York, New Jersey and Louisiana. The VHA also has a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Defense to serve as a backup in times of war or terrorist attack.
Study after study has confirmed that the care VHA delivers to veterans not only equal to but very often superior to the care delivered by the private sector. Surveys of veterans also document that veterans highly approve of their dedicated health care system and want to see it improved and even expanded.
Unfortunately, neither the messages veterans are sending or those published in prestigious scientific journals have convinced Republican—and even too many Democratic—lawmakers to fully fund and staff the VHA. Over the past decade, a powerful movement funded by billionaire industrialists like the Koch Brothers and other dark money allies like Elon Musk—supported by the hospital, medical equipment and pharmaceutical industries—have launched a movement to privatize the VHA and even attack the benefits administered by the VBA.
Should this movement succeed, it will create serious problems not only for veterans but for all Americans. As I will explain in the next article, it will exacerbate an already catastrophic shortage of health care in rural America.
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This article first appeared in Barn Raiser. It is the first story in a series of articles by Suzanne Gordon, Barn Raiser, on the Veterans Administration and its importance to rural veterans and rural health care systems
Rendezvous with Japanese Labor
By Peter Olney
A good friend recently suggested that it was interesting that I have established labor left political ties in two of the former Axis powers: Italy and Japan. My ties with Italy go back over 54 years and are both political and very personal.
My son Nelson led me to Japan, a place I really had never even considered visiting. It is now three years in a row that Christina and I have visited Japan. On each trip I have met up with comrade leaders in Zenroren, the second largest labor federation with 1.3 million members. Historically, and to this day Zenroren is a federation with strong leadership from the Japanese Communist Party. The JCP is the largest communist party in the industrialized world with over 250,000 members and 16 members of the National Diet (parliament), as well as strong representation on governing bodies in urban areas. The Party has maintained its independence from Peking and Moscow, and is seen as a leader of the peace movement in Japan.
I was originally introduced to Zenroren by the very talented and effective teacher union organizer Barbara Madeloni from my home state of Massachusetts. She had done a training on internal union organizing for Zenroren a few years back and set me up to do a training in 2023 on my first visit to Japan. My training included role-playing and small group work. Keisuke Fuse, the Deputy Secretary General of Zenroren and their director of International relations ably interpreted for me.
In March of 2025, on the heels of Trump’s election, Zenroren asked me to do a forum in person, and on Zoom, to explain why Trump was elected.
On my most recent visit the topic was the resistance to Trump! Ninety-four unionists, in person and on a Zoom, showed up on March 16th for the forum. The meeting was chaired by Secretary General Kurasawa and interpreted by Keisuke and Manubu Natori.
I sketched out the resistance to Trump as occurring on 4 levels:
Electoral
Mass resistance
Judicial and
Cultural
I brought a whistle to demonstrate the signaling methods of the anti-ICE organizers in the Twin Cities and nationwide. Three short tweets for “ICE is in the hood” and one long blast for “ICE has detained someone.”
My presentation took place after the Venezuelan baseball team had defeated the reigning Japanese team laden with MLB All Stars like Showei Ohtani. I argued that anti-imperialism argued for the Japanese to support Venezuela in their upcoming games thru to the championship. This appeal was met with applause, as were my pleas that the Japanese stars on the Dodgers refuse to go to the White House to meet with Trump.
Questions from the participants focused on learning more about Minneapolis and the resistance and on how leaders can better involve their rank and file members in the life of the union. Clearly here the positive influence of Labor Notes and its orientation and trainings have impacted the culture of Zenroren.
March 17 – The next day I was part of an extraordinary meeting that I helped to organize with the Zenkoku-Kowan, the federation of Japanese dockworkers. This organization has historic ties with International Longshoremen Warehouse Workers (ILWU), and comes to the convention of my union every three years to renew solidarity charters. I met with many of these leaders during my first visit in 2023. The founder of the ILWU, Harry Bridges, was married to a Japanese woman, Noriko “Nikki” Sawada who was a writer and civil rights activist.
My friend Stas Magaronis, the President of the Propeller Club of Northern California, and a columnist for the American Journal of Transportation requested that I set up the meeting as his visit to Tokyo coincided with mine. We met at the union’s headquarters in Kamata, near the waterfront. Zenkoku-Kowan hosted us with a delegation of 8 leaders of the overall Federation and leaders of member long shore and clerk divisions. It was a far ranging discussion covering topics of automation and port volumes. The Japanese trade unionists described a relative decline in dockworkers wages and therefore real difficulties in recruiting young workers to the waterfront. The delegation was led by Masaya Tamada General Secretary of Zenkoku –Kowan, the National Federation of Dockworkers Union of Japan. The Japanese expressed a strong opposition to any military involvement by Japan in the US led Iran war.
Two days of labor meetings were very fruitful, but I have only barely begun to understand Japanese trade unionism.
Fortunately many of these trade unionists will be at the Labor Notes conference in Chicago in mid June.
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Back to Back – Outside and Inside- Labor and Industry
By Peter Olney
In March of 2025 I had participated in the Shunto wage offensive. All of Japan’s labor unions propose their annual wage settlements to the employers and the employers respond to the major industry groups by the middle of the month. Shunto originated in the 60’s as a way to prevent corporate whipsawing of union demands – a kind of mass sectoral approach to bargaining over wages even though most Japanese unions in the private sector are company based.
This visit I attended a very spirited multi labor confederation rally outside the Ministry of Education and Labor on March 5 in Hibaya Park. A few thousand workers and union leaders lined the avenue in front of the ministry. I was energized by meeting up with the leaders of Zenroren and particularly happy to see that Secretary General Kurasawa was in the center of a contingent holding a banner denouncing the barbaric US/Israel war on Iran.
The results of the wage negotiations have come in for some key sectors, particularly auto. Despite the Trump tariffs and the Iran war’s impact on energy, Toyota for instance has agreed to the 5% increase that the unions were demanding. As of March 23rd, an average wage hike of 5.26 % was achieved for 1,100 unions representing 1.42 million workers. Settlement for smaller firms will continue into the summer. The willingness of management to agree to union demands is largely explained by labor market challenges around retention.
On March 6 I met with Sho Tayeda, a staff person at the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry (METI) . He explained that his area of responsibility was human resources and the investment in “human capital”. I asked his explanation for the astoundingly low 13/1 CEO to worker pay ratio in Japan. He said that the Japanese capitalist economy in promoting human capital investment, had a tinge of socialism.
He also explained that in his country Amazon is second to Rakuten, a Japanese firm. Amazon and related firms employ about 15,000 in Japan, whereas Rakuten employs upward of 29,000. Their business models are starkly different. Amazon acts as a closed ecosystem controlling logistics and inventory, whereas Rakuten generally offers an open platform for third party sellers to manage their own operations.My two days on Ministry Row near Hibaya Park brought me a little closer to understanding Japanese labor relations. All of those understandings would be tested when I presented to the comrades of Zenroren on March 16th!
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Tony Mazzocchi inspired me to organize
By Rand Wilson
This year is the centennial of Tony Mazzocchi birth — and friends, allies, and former co-workers of his are coming together at the Rutgers University Labor Center on June 4-5, for an in-depth discussion of his life and legacy. An article about Tony and the upcoming conference by Steve Early and me is posted HERE.
Tony had a powerful influence on my life in the labor movement. He eventually became a mentor and close family friend. Below is my recollection of when I first met him, and how that inspired me to want to build power for workers.
After I graduated from college, I was working as an intern at the Center for the Study of Public Policy in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Center also published a magazine, Working Papers for New Society, that was a forum for exploring institutional alternatives and positive policy proposals in the wake of the 1960s New Left.
One day in 1978, one of the editors, Nancy Lyons, suggested that I attend a lecture at the Harvard School of Public Health by Tony Mazzocchi, a leader of the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) and a nationally acclaimed workers’ health and safety pioneer. Sounded interesting, so I went.
Tony gave a blistering labor speech: A no holds barred critique of capitalism and the political neoliberalism emerging at that time. It was nothing that I hadn’t heard before — but never with such a sharp class analysis and specifically orientated to labor.
What got me really inspired was Tony’s appraisal of how by organizing and building the labor movement, workers could “change the nature of the debate.” (I later grew to understand that what I was hearing was classic Tony.) I was hooked. That evening’s lecture inspired me to dedicate my life to building the labor movement.
Around that time, I was in a “study group” reading books on labor-related topics. One night David Nobel, a professor from MIT, attended our meeting and announced that there was a new group forming and looking for volunteer labor organizers. You can only imagine how overjoyed I was to learn it was an opportunity to organize with the OCAW. It felt like destiny, a miracle! (By the way, no one else in the study group was interested. I never went back to that group.)
I signed up with Noble, was given the address for the next meeting. It was convened by a wonderful local activist, Carolyn Mugar, who was spearheading a volunteer core of organizers in Massachusetts for OCAW. I began attending the group’s weekly meetings. We informally called it the Boston Organizing Project. Our organizing work was guided by weekly visits from Richard “Mac” McManus, a past president of OCAW Local 8-149, an organizer for the OCAW District 8 Council, and Tony’s righthand man. In addition to Carolyn and David Noble, some of the activists involved included Janet Corpus, Tim Griffin, Alex Keyssar, Kathy Moore, Michael Musuraca, Sid Peck and John O’Connor.
Nearly every week, a group of volunteer organizers (often accompanied by Mac) would travel to one or several factories all over Eastern Massachusetts that were in OCAW’s jurisdiction. We passed out union leaflets at shift changes hoping to engage workers about their on-the-job issues and the benefits of forming a union. Although quite naive in retrospect, our work resulted in several successful campaigns. Occasionally (and especially with third shift), workers would actually cheer, “the union is here, the union is here.”
At some point Mac (who by this time I regarded as my labor mentor) told me that Local 8-149 had an “in” at American Chemical and Refining which had just been purchased by Handy and Harman in Waterbury, CT. OCAW had a neutrality deal with H&H and if I was interested in organizing, I should consider working there.
So, I got a job there and moved into an apartment in the Waterville neighborhood where ACR was located. After a few weeks, I began building an organizing committee of interested workers. The company stayed true to its word and remained neutral. The workers at ACR, like others in the “brass valley” were a tough bunch — including a few self-proclaimed Klan members. Every week or so I met with Ed Ott, my organizer from Local 8-149. After a few months of intensive work, we petitioned for an NLRB representation election and the union easily won.
In addition to Ed Ott, the organizing at ACR led me to meet many of the other leaders and activists who were in Local 8-149 including Eric Scherzer, Neal Gorfinkle, Stan Fischer, and George Roach. Most significantly, I met Mark Dudzic, then a local officer who was working at a sister Handy and Harman facility in New Jersey. In later years, Mark became my “union brother from another mother.”
I returned home to Somerville determined to do more organizing and put into practice what I had learned in Waterbury. Without much thought or effort, I got a job sometime as a “quality control checker” at Clinical Assays (a subsidiary of Baxter Travenol Labs) in Cambridge.
It turned out to be one of the most consequential (and challenging) experiences of my life.
Clinical had a very diverse workforce. Half the workers were from different countries in Latin America and about a quarter were African American or of Caribbean descent. The challenge of building unity among these groups was daunting.
I worked for about six months just building relationships, identifying potential leaders, and never saying a word about unions. After I passed the probation period, I started getting more involved with typical workplace activities. Circulating birthday cards, raising money for coworkers out sick or facing a personal crisis, and helping with occasional lunchtime or after work parties. Being a QC inspector was especially advantageous, because I got to work in every production department and a chance meet just about every worker.
After about 10 months or so, I began to agitate about issues with co-workers who I thought would be receptive. Low pay, bad supervisors, health and safety, and unfair discipline all made very engaging issues.
I frequently asked my co-workers to teach me Spanish. Those informal lessons were a great opportunity for me to discuss shop floor issues and occasionally what I knew about workers’ rights. And I often discovered that many of the immigrant workers had been active with militant labor movements in their home countries.
Some of the most active workers who organized with me (a few pictured at left) included Creceta Allen, Hubert Allen, Enrique Allen, Angie Seay, Jaime Salamanca, Darlene Stout, and Clyde Williamson. Other key activists were Ferdinand Barreto, Gloria Barrett, Carmine Crespo, Tim Griffin, John Morawetz, Mario Salinas and June Salvi.
One of the best actions was against a supervisor who sat at the front of the bottling department with a baseball bat. He would repeatedly pound the bat into his hand in a menacing way, urging us to work harder. It wasn’t hard to get lots of signatures on a petition calling on management to get him out. We turned in our petitions to management, and he was gone in a day!
Through on the job activity like that, it was easy to identify people with whom I could safely have the “union talk.” Then, in consultation with Mac, we decided it was time to have our first organizing committee meeting.
I spoke with each person about having our first meeting at a nearby elementary school. All confirmed that they would attend. Mac drove up from Long Island. You can only imagine my excitement about the meeting after months of patient work. Mac and I waited — and waited. Not one person showed.
I was completely shattered and crestfallen. But Mac had a great idea. Because no one showed, I could tell each potential committee person that the meeting was a great success. When they would inevitably ask who came, I would just say, “those who attended asked that it be kept confidential — and you shouldn’t miss the next meeting.”
The plan worked. The next day everyone asked about the meeting, and I told the big fib. When we had a second meeting two weeks later, nearly everyone showed up, and the new Clinical Assays / OCAW organizing committee was off to the races!
In a few weeks we had a majority of the employees signed up on membership authorization cards and filed a petition for an election with the National Labor Relations Board. The board scheduled an election for about six weeks later. That began the most intense six weeks of my life. Management brought in corporate lawyers from a top union busting law based in Chicago, scheduled meetings with every worker, and began a daily barrage of anti-union propaganda.
Despite our attempt to inoculate everyone in advance, the company’s campaign was having a huge impact. It had the intended effect of completely polarizing the natural harmony that existed among all of the workers. The “union question,” which had been met with either enthusiasm or indifference, now was perceived to have divided family members and friends. It created an almost intolerable atmosphere. People felt that if they voted for the union, management would never let up and the intense divisions between pro and anti-union workers would only get worse. Everyone’s focus changed from being fed up with our low wages and lack of respect, to concerns about union dues, strikes, fines and “outsiders” making decisions. Our majority support for the union was slipping fast.
I had one last ditch ploy to regain our momentum. There was a group of college educated lab techs who were excluded as professionals from our proposed bargaining unit. I quietly persuaded a very slim majority to sign cards and we filed for a separate election a week before the NLRB vote.
Management was blown away. The production workers were amazed that the higher paid “professionals” wanted a union too. A few workers who were wavering resumed their support. Momentum shifted in our favor and we won the election by three votes! But of course management challenged the eligibility of eight ballots. And because the challenged ballots could determine the outcome of the election, we had to wait for the Regional NLRB to rule on the eligibility of those ballots.
After about two months of tense waiting, the regional director ruled in our favor. Then the company appealed the decision to the national labor relations board in DC. Several more months went by. This was agony for me and our committee.
Because everything was in limbo, the delay gave the company time to make some favorable changes and also push out a few key union supporters. Others left just fed up with inaction. Most workers were convinced that the government had been bought off. It was a terribly demoralizing time.
Finally, five months after the original vote, the national board finally issued its decision and all of the challenged ballots were opened and counted. We won our union and the right to collectively bargain with management!
Once we were certified, OCAW International Rep. Frank Micale was assigned to help us negotiate our first contract. We elected a negotiating committee, set dates to bargain with management and drafted our demands.
Bargaining with professional union busting lawyers with just a 2% majority and no credible strike threat was not easy or fun. We did get a contract, but that’s a story for another day
Some things to consider before getting a job to organize
I fell into the job at Clinical without any forethought or research. I needed work, and there was a job opening. I didn’t consider that Baxter Travenol — a huge Fortune 500, multinational corporation with tens of thousands of employees in scores of facilities across the country and around the world – did not have a single union facility. That made the mission that I had taken on much too ambitious – and this was especially so because it was also not a strategic objective for OCAW. I had undertaken a campaign where the employer was deeply committed to a “union free environment” and had developed, and perfected over many years, a sophisticated “union avoidance” program.
So, there I was, on an impossible mission, trying to build a union with very little support against a global non-union empire. Oddly, not one of my union pals who should have known better bothered to tell me.
Nevertheless, organizing at Clinical Assays (and to a lesser extent at ACR), taught me many important lessons about the hard work of building on-the-job unity, and the challenges of engaging coworkers to take the risks of forming a union. My experience taught me respect for the drudgery of work, and the humiliation of having to obey a supervisor’s ignorant and often insulting commands.
I learned lessons about the challenges of maintaining a shop floor organization while management is waging a never-ending battle against it. And most importantly, my experience informed my thinking and sensitivity to workers’ struggles from the bottom up. For that, I’m eternally grateful because for the rest of my life it’s been the fire in my belly to keep organizing.
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Anthony “Tony” Fazio
By Mike Miller
Anthony Joseph Fazio (11/02/1947 – 04/25/2026), known as Tony or Papa, passed away peacefully at the age of 78 after a two-year battle with cancer. Tony was born in Providence, Rhode Island, to Joseph Fazio and Vincenza (Nancy) Baffoni Fazio. In 1968, Tony moved coast to coast to San Francisco, where he and his best friend –also named Tony– bought a house he famously bragged was with “no money down.” He and his buddies turned that house into the home he would bring his family to and live in for the rest of his life. While in San Francisco, and occasionally in Washington, D.C., Tony worked on impressive political races, won awards for creative and successful campaigns, made lifelong friends, and met and married his loving wife of 44 years, Marie Jobling. They had three children, and were grandparents to four.
Tony spent much of his career as an award-winning campaign consultant at Winning Directions. He moved from humble beginnings as a grocery clerk and warehouseman, to working in retail and nonprofit spaces, to community organizing, which was a true passion for Tony. Later he became a business owner and respected political consultant, building a life defined by political expertise, cultivating deep relationships, and a genuine passion for helping people.
[Published by San Francisco Chronicle from May 7 to May 10, 2026, republished on Legacy.com]
Mike Miller Remembers Tony
Tony was the most people-oriented person I’ve ever known. He loved people in all shapes and sizes, and from all backgrounds. If someone he knew, or a neighbor who he barely knew, had problems, Tony was there to offer help to solve them. His hospitality was legendary, as was his cooking that was often part of it. When I was in trouble with the San Francisco Planning and Building Inspection Departments and asked Tony to help, there were no reservations even though it was likely to be a time-consuming task.
This is the story of how we first met and how he became a committed community organizer.
In 1971, I was hired by Rev. Bill Smith, Executive Director of the Visitation Valley Community Center, to organize a neighborhood people power organization . Bill was a Presbyterian minister who had gone, as had many Presbyterian clergy with support from their denomination, to a 10-day organizing workshop led by Saul Alinsky, then America’s best known radical and community organizer. I had earlier directed one of Alinsky’s organizing projects.
Tony was a San Francisco State work-study placement at the Community Center. Smith invited him to be part of the organizing effort. That’s how Tony and I met. He hadn’t heard of Alinsky, and “community organizing” was only a vague idea in his head. But he was interested and took Bill up on his offer.
Tony already knew lots of people in “The Valley,” a neighborhood of about 30,000 people in the southeast corner of San Francisco. He made it his business to meet and get to know people. One of the people he knew was the neighborhood locksmith, a Black guy named Ron Morton. Tony recruited him to be part of the organizing effort’s temporary leadership. (A founding convention planned for several months down-the-road would elect annual leaders.)
At one of our meetings, Tony sadly told me that Morton was going to have to move. He had been turned down on a loan application by the Small Business Administration (SBA) which at the time had a special grants program for minority business people. Tony was sad. In our conversation that followed, Tony readily saw that the loan denial was not only a Ron Morton problem, but a neighborhood problem and that we could turn it into an issue.
Tony organized a delegation of Morton supporters. They went to Congressman Philip Burton’s office with a proposal that he intercede and get the loan to Morton. Burton did. Morton got the loan. Tony became a convert: he wanted to be a community organizer.
He did. He was an key organizer in the formation of All Peoples Coalition. There he was the key organizer of the Geneva Towers Tenant Association in a 500+ unit two building low-to-moderate income housing development. The successful effort led to an agreement with the landlord for a substantially lowered rent increase, multiple repairs and maintenance work, and new social programs. One of the leaders of the tenant organization was hired as a site manager—and promptly told by the rest of the Association’s leaders, “Marvin, you’re now on the other side of the table.”
He was later an organizer in the development of the Citizens Action League (CAL)—a statewide organization that won lifeline utility rates in California and almost passed the California Tax Justice Act—whose adoption would have aborted what became Proposition 13 and the beginning of the country’s mid-1970s conservative tax revolt.
He also was an organizer in South Dakota for ACORN—the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
Tony and I were very good friends.
I miss him deeply.
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Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition: Keeping Hope Alive
By Kurt Stand
REVEREND JESSE JACKSON, born in poverty in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1941, was a member of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), taking part in the famed 1965 Selma to Montgomery march and later the Poor People’s Campaign. He was present with other SCLC leaders when King was assassinated in 1968. Jackson then moved to Chicago — where the Civil Rights Movement had been met with extreme violence — to establish People United to Save Humanity (PUSH) as both a force for self-health and racial/economic justice advocacy. A book could be written about Jackson’s lifelong participation in movements demanding peace, justice, and freedom. His passing on February 17, 2026, justly led to numerous tributes — even from those who were hostile to his politics.
Not enough attention, however, has been paid to the extraordinary impact of Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns, as well as the Rainbow Coalition as an organizational expression of those electoral efforts and the aspirations they embodied. Jackson was a national figure, of many years’ standing, in the fight for racial and economic justice. He was also a local figure — as he helped make DC statehood a national issue with a prominence it hadn’t received for many years — and was elected the District’s first “Shadow Senator” (alongside Florence Pendleton) in 1992 with over 100,000 votes. He frequently reminded audiences that DC statehood was amongst the original demands of the Civil Rights Movement.
Today, it is particularly important to recall how Jackson built upon the still-living legacy of the 1960s and ‘70s Civil Rights and Black Freedom Movement to give voice to those being silenced by the Reagan administration’s assault on egalitarianism, democratic rights, and working-class institutions. Jackson’s vision of a “Rainbow” celebrating the multi-racial, multi-cultural character of United States society presented an alternative to President Ronald Reagan’s exclusivist, racist notion of community — social Darwinian, one-against-all — and “greed is good” economics. The opposition between the two perspectives demonstrated two vastly differing models for our country: Jackson envisioned a society rooted in mutual support, while Reagan sowed division and economic devastation. This opposition is drawn even more sharply today, as Trump’s assaults on social good slash even deeper into social need and democratic values.
THREE SPEECHES: THE BREADTH OF JACKSON’S APPEAL
“My commitment as a presidential candidate is to focus on and lift those boats stuck on the bottom full of unpolished pearls. For if the boats on the bottom rise, all boats above will rise … The way I propose to do this is to build a new functional “Rainbow Coalition of the Rejected” spanning lines of color, sex, age, religion, region and national origin. The old minorities — Blacks, Hispanics, women, peace activists, environmentalists, youth, the elderly, small farmers, small businesspersons, poor people, gays and lesbians — if we remain apart, will continue to be a minority. But, if we come together, the old minorities constitute a new majority. That is how I propose to be nominated and elected President.”
Jesse Jackson Presidential Campaign Flyer, 1984
It is hard today to fully grasp the multi-faceted nature of Jackson’s challenge to established authority and his outreach to the excluded. His mixture of the spiritual and practical, his respect for the intelligence of his audience, and his awareness of what brought them out to a gathering embodied the democratic ethos of his campaigns. Remembrances of three speeches, each given in sharply different settings, may provide a glimpse of its scope.
The First Spech: During the 1988 Democratic presidential primary, Jackson gave a speech at the Bible Way Church in downtown Washington, DC. The enormous African American church, one with a long history of fighting against segregation and racism, was packed. Jackson’s sermon spoke to those in attendance of the dignity of all labor, the dignity of those who clean bedpans and pick up the trash, drive the buses and serve the food, raise children and care for the elderly, all those who do the hardest and heaviest jobs — often for the least pay. Or none at all. Standing in the rafters, watching those below and around me while listening, I could feel how his words resonated. He acknowledged the spiritual value of labor, of mutuality, of community as the bedrock of African American survival. He connected that acknowledgement with the political demand that the dignity of those who work should be accompanied by wages and rights sufficient to meet the needs and dreams of working people.
What we heard was a sermon in the form of a call to action.
The Second Speech: It was 1991, on the eve of the first Gulf War. There was a national Rainbow conference at a DC hotel — and it so happened that there were numerous soldiers staying there who were about to be deployed to Iraq. Jackson invited those young people about to go off to war to attend, for free, the fundraising gala held at the gathering’s close; many took him up on the offer. Roberta Flack sang that evening, including, appropriately, John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
Jackson spoke afterward to all present, but with words specifically directed to those who showed up in uniform — words expressed with deep respect for them without apologizing for the Rainbow’s opposition to the US invasion soon to be launched. Jackson stressed that the real war we needed to fight was against hunger, homelessness, and hatred in our midst; that the real needs were education, health care, jobs with a future here in our own country. I looked around and saw people listening attentively, absorbing what was being said. Addressing people who most needed to hear that an alternative is possible, Jackson defined the choices we have to make as individuals and as a society, expressing the values behind the program around which we were organizing.
The Third Speech: In the mid-90s, Decatur, Illinois, was a self-designated “class-war zone,” as industrial disputes were being waged simultaneously at the Caterpillar tractor factory, the Bridgestone-Firestone tire plant, and A.E. Staley — a corn milling subsidiary of global food supply conglomerate Tate & Lyle. The unions survived those fights, but all much reduced in size, strength, and conditions by the time they were over. Perhaps the bitterest struggle was at Staley: militant, well-organized, and determined workers were locked out for over three years. In 1995, a few months before a contract was signed that imposed the concessions that workers had been resisting (and allowed scabs to remain on the job), a last, large rally was held in Decatur as part of a final push to force the company to settle on honorable terms. Numerous union leaders spoke — as did Jackson. He honored the locked-out workers for their courage and integrity. He talked of the need for labor solidarity to spread more widely and sharply, and he talked about Nelson Mandela. About Mandela’s long years in prison and his commitment to endure even when victory appeared to be nowhere within reach. For those listening, the message was clear — this fight may end in defeat, but the war is far from over. Very different in style and substance from the speech at Bible Way or that directed at soldiers, his words struck home — for Jesse was speaking to people, not at them.
BUILDING A RAINBOW
“The Rainbow takes on many combinations. There are ideological rainbows; the Rainbow has a color dimension. The Rainbow makes room for the locked out, the rejected stones. There’s an age dimension to the Rainbow. It makes room for the very young and the very old. There’s another dimension. There are schools of thought … The Rainbow is a call to be progressive.”Jackson’s speech to the National Rainbow Leadership Conference, June 1984
Between the three speeches remembered above, one can grasp the essence of Jackson’s campaigns: linking ending US wars abroad with overcoming poverty, hunger, unemployment domestically; organizing on the principle that ending racial injustice and ending the exploitation of all working people are not separate issues, but are inextricably combined — part and parcel of all liberation movements, of all strivings for a democracy rooted in freedom and equality. From 1985 until the early 1990s, the Rainbow Coalition, a Black-led “movement of movements,” grew as an organization by building community and labor support for those ends.
Acting in tandem with Jackson’s election campaigns, the Rainbow functioned as part of an “inside-outside” strategy — working within the electoral system and mainstream institutions of society while simultaneously working outside those structures to create the basis for more fundamental changes, to transform power relationships within our country. But, while accurate, it is a little too pat to put it that way. Jackson articulated individuals’ right to take life in their own hands and change the conditions in which they lived, and that they had the power to do so as long as each and every democratizing initiative was part of a collective effort across all lines of division.
The Rainbow sought to become a popular organizational expression of the upsurge of activism that flowed in the wake of Jackson’s campaigns and public events. In the words of Jack O’Dell, a key advisor to Jackson, “the Rainbow Coalition represents the Peace and Justice movement for social change entering the electoral arena, as an independent force … [It] is a mass political movement, committed to the expansion of the definition and practice of democracy in our country, including the realization of economic justice. As such it has to be bold enough to perceive of itself as the historic replacement for the existing two-party system: one prepared to act as a dual authority.”
Working within the electoral system, within the Democratic Party, and within other established institutions is necessary, as Jackson’s campaigns made abundantly evident, in order to engage millions of people in the struggle for justice; people who do not ordinarily see political action as central to daily living, people whose widely varied voices, ideas, beliefs, and values are nonetheless as essential to social change as those of activists and organizers. It is equally necessary to work outside those institutions to change the political climate, the range of possibility, to widen what we can envision as possible, to realize in practice the potential of transformative possibilities — so that ending war and poverty, ensuring dignity for all are not pie-in-the-sky dreams, but hopes that can be realized in our lifetimes.
Washington, DC, provides an example of the way this process unfolded. Inspired by the growth of local Rainbows elsewhere in the country, activists from different Spanish-speaking communities formed a Latino Rainbow in DC composed of activists from Guatemala and El Salvador involved in the solidarity movements with their home countries, immigrant workers inspired by the Justice for Janitors organizing campaign then underway, as well as individuals responding to Jackson’s message of inclusion and struggle from other parts of the community. They organized to build support for Jackson during the Democratic presidential primary in 1988; they also worked to build ties between unionists and solidarity activists within Latino communities around the Rainbow’s domestic program, as well as opposition to US military intervention and economic exploitation south of the United States border.
Taking a cue from that initiative, a number of us formed a local Labor Rainbow encompassing DC, suburban Maryland, and northern Virginia. Our ranks included members, staffers, and elected leaders of different federal worker and teachers’ unions, from AFSCME, SEIU, the Machinists, and locals from other unions. This was not a coalition in the traditional sense of the word, of people representing different organizations — and we never aimed to replace existing union leadership or replicate the work unionists were doing within their own organizations. Rather, we were composed of people working to build support for Jackson’s programs and proposals within union membership.
Partly we sought to bring together local labor networks building support for the anti-apartheid Free South Africa movement and those opposing US intervention in Central America. Partly our goal was to build inter-union solidarity and strike support for local and national labor disputes, such as paper-mill workers on strike in Jay, Maine, and cannery workers on strike in Watsonville, California (and workers at Diamond Walnut in Stockton, California, whose strike was to last 14 years). Connected to this was our support for national legislation to ban the use of “permanent replacement” — i.e., scabs replacing fired workers in industrial disputes, as happened in Decatur and in countless other labor disputes at the time — which was a key element in Jackson’s platform.
We also worked to build support within our unions for the broader progressive agenda of Jackson’s presidential campaign and the issues he was highlighting. Among these were support for DC statehood, defending voting rights nationally and expanding voting registration, and for a broad progressive social agenda: to improve local public education, build affordable housing, establish a public health system, and protect and improve welfare benefits. These were, and are, all working-class needs as critical to working people’s lives as job protection, decent wages, and grievance procedures at work. All were and are issues that spoke to racial and economic justice.
Similarly, we were aiming to build understanding amongst unionists of the need for the nuclear freeze, the need to convert arms production to non-lethal industrial production, and the critical importance of union-based industrial policy proposals such as those put forth by the Industrial Union Division of the AFL-CIO, by the UAW, and especially the more radical vision of the International Association of Machinists. The IAM advocated direct union representation on federal economic planning boards, legislative measures to control the movement of capital, use of pension funds to reinvest in urban needs, and a jobs program to meet public needs.
Ultimately, we became part of the (more bureaucratic) District-wide Rainbow in DC while maintaining our autonomy (as did the Latino Rainbow). Other local Rainbow Coalitions were organized in Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties — each with a distinct character. Such initiatives took shape with different emphases and different structures throughout the country and expressed themselves around multiple issues — women’s rights, immigrant solidarity, Black women’s needs, environmental protection. Additionally, Jackson and the Rainbow stood openly for gay rights, something still uncommon in the 1980s; few in organized labor would publicly take such a stance, nor would any mainstream Democratic presidential candidate utter such words. Even more rare at the time, Jackson and the Rainbow welcomed support from the Arab American community and brought an unprecedented number of Arab Americans into the Jackson presidential campaign. And thus, too, Jackson recognized the justice of the Palestinian cause and stood as a voice for peace and justice in the Middle East.
This recognition that justice is indivisible was itself rooted in a long tradition of African American opposition to war and the linkage of the need to end racism with the need to see the human face of those killed in the US’s endless wars of aggression. This reflected the depth of the solidarity that was built into Jackson’s campaigns — how often he would tell the story of the Good Samaritan, talk of Joseph and Mary as homeless refugees, speak of meeting the needs of the least of us; Christian messages that were wholly and completely ecumenical.
ENDINGS AND NEW BEGINNINGS
“America is not like a blanket, one unbroken piece of cloth, one color, one character, one texture, one religion. It is more like a quilt of many patches, many pieces, many colors, many textures, many religions, many sizes. And yet everyone fits somewhere, everybody is somebody.” Jesse Jackson for President Campaign Booklet, 1984
A couple of years after our Rainbow’s promising beginning, much of the local activity we had been building began to dwindle. The Rainbow, built around Jackson’s presidential campaigns, only lasted a few years, as a national force, after his 1988 run.
The lines being drawn were evident at a 1991 Rainbow Conference in DC, even though it was well attended. About 800 people went to a labor breakfast, with local union members and national leaders present. Mainstream Democrats spoke at the conference, making clear their opposition to Jackson running a third time, making clear their distrust of the Rainbow as an independent force. For them, the issue was simple: a choice between Democrats and Republicans. Any attempt to raise issues of war and peace, any attempt to speak directly of racism, any attempt to advocate universal reforms such as national health insurance were dismissed as divisive and as providing an opportunity for Republicans to hold onto power.
Republican gains were all too often the product of the gap between the words of Democratic Party leadership and their deeds in Congress, where they acquiesced time and again to Republican initiatives.
AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer Bill Lucy — head of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and a strong supporter of Jackson — challenged that proposition. Agreeing that it was necessary to defeat the Republican nominee in 1992 and put a brake on the cruelty and destructiveness of the policies implemented by the Reagan and first Bush administrations, he also noted that winning an election was by itself not sufficient. Republican gains were, he argued, all too often the product of the gap between the words of Democratic Party leadership and their deeds in Congress, where they acquiesced time and again to Republican initiatives. The answer, Lucy stressed, was in the program and work of the Rainbow — building independent politics from below to address workers’ needs rather than those of corporations, building power from below to stop Republican reaction, to force Democrats to enact needed social legislation.
That evening, Jackson also directed his remarks to that challenge. The Republican reaction maintained its power by inflaming racial tensions and resentment toward women, he said, thereby inhibiting the ability of people to see their common interests. Jackson’s answer — and the answer of the Rainbow — was to open, not close, debate. It was not to ask those who suffer the most to keep silent, but rather for the Democratic Party, for our society, to allow for more democracy, more voices to be heard. Specific demands spoke to specific needs, be it the needs of a young Black teenager unjustly jailed, a farmer losing his land, a woman unable to secure an abortion or another woman subjected to forced sterilization, a trade unionist on strike, or an unemployed family seeking shelter — Jackson and the Rainbow argued that their concrete demands, when pronounced in unison, are the framework for fighting for the common good.
The rest is history. Jackson recognized that he would be unable to replicate his 1988 gains (let alone win the nomination) if he ran a third time; he recognized that a third-party independent run would be marginalized. Neoliberalism within the Democratic Party won out, closing down discussion, compromising on basic rights, putting in place programs that ameliorated some injustices while leaving an unjust system in place. Although Democrats in office were an improvement on Republicans, the fact is that Democratic weakness — the gap between promises and actions Lucy scored, the shutting down of internal debate Jackson decried — enabled Republican gains and led to the situation we currently face: authoritarian reaction without apology in the Trump administration.
The Rainbow’s failure was not only due to the power of its opponents. Its strength was its amorphous, open character. But that contained a weakness, for once the movement lost momentum (when Jackson was no longer campaigning for president), it was hard to maintain cohesion. More important, although the Rainbow was truly a broad-based organization with far-reaching support, it never developed sufficient roots within the broader public on the scale needed. It never reached organizationally those soldiers sent to Iraq, those churchgoers at Bible Way, those locked-out workers in Decatur. Jackson sensed that. When he moved back to Chicago from DC, he also reduced his commitment to the Rainbow, which ceased to be the vehicle for change it had been. But Jackson’s decision isn’t the substantive issue — putting the matter in another way, had the Rainbow built greater strength during its peak years, it may well have survived and thrived.
Life, however, is not about “what ifs.” It is about facing the present by building upon the legacy of the past. The aim of the architects of the Rainbow was to serve as a form of dual power — an independent, multi-racial movement rooted in communities and sections of working people facing the most intense forms of oppression — and to use that base to challenge constituted authority by working with elected officeholders, union leaders, and public personalities in all walks of life who are the other expression of public power. In such a scenario, those two forms of power are mutually supportive even when not fully aligned; they change public understanding, and they have the strength to bring about the structural changes needed to bring to fruition the vision Jackson so beautifully articulated.
Jackson’s presidential campaigns built upon King’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign (during the course of which King was assassinated), built upon the original Rainbow of the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and Young Patriots, built upon the 1972 National Black Political Convention. As Sheila Collins, an activist within, and chronicler of, the Rainbow, wrote: “almost all the top leadership of the Jackson campaign received their political education either in the Civil Rights Movement or one of the other movements generated by it — the Black power movement, the feminist movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the Chicano movement, the Native American movement, and various others.”
Likewise, today we can build upon the still living legacy of the Rainbow.
As our societal crisis deepens, the elements are in place to build a transformative movement broader than was evident in the 1980s. We can see that in the impact of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, in the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Summer Lee, Ayanna Presley, Pramila Jayapal, Greg Casar, Zohran Mamdani, Janeese Lewis George, and hundreds more; in the legacy of Occupy and the Black Lives Matter protests; in the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party, the Poor People’s Campaign; in the mass actions and campaigns called by Indivisible, Move On, Our Revolution; in the movement to block Immigration and Customs Enforcement, from Los Angeles to Minneapolis; in the work to protect abortion providers and seekers and to safeguard trans lives; in union organizing by the UAW at auto plants, in nurses’ strikes across the country, in the actions by workers at Amazon and Starbucks; in the movement in solidarity with Palestine and now opposition to the war against Iran.
And when we look at the enormous crowds who attended Bernie and AOC’s anti-oligarchy tour, we see today a potential for radical transformation. It is up to us to find a way to seize the opportunity by building, organizing, and cohering based on principles rooted in popular participation, not in lines drawn to keep some in and some out.
A path forward lies in putting all these elements together in a way that allows all parts to thrive. It is difficult to see in these dark times, indeed. But possible, yes. For as Jesse reminded us again and again: “Keep Hope Alive.”
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This piece originally ran in the Washington Socialist
Hidden. Buried. Lost. Forgotten.
By Lincoln Cushing
Clickbaiting history
It seems that the only way to attract readers to non-fictional narrative is to evoke intrigue and conspiracy. Even the venerable Atlantic magazine print version article titled “The Women of Avenger Field” changed their online version to “The Forgotten Female Pilots of World War II.”
In the social media sphere a persistent story line is about an ordinary person who subverted the standard way of doing things, came up with a clever solution to a problem, and then vanished from public knowledge. It’s an attractive trope, ostensibly honoring the “little people” whose street smarts ends up being better than conventional wisdom. But what happens when such a story, presented as fact, is false?
This February I received a baffled email from an education staffer at Richmond’s Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park: “We have had two inquiries from visitors about an incredible story – a welder named Bessie Hamill at Kaiser Shipyard 3 who developed a new welding sequence to solve the issue of cracking Liberty Ships.” Even with a corps of actual vintage WWII “Rosies” in the house the ranger had never before heard this.
I was the historian for the health care provider Kaiser Permanente and had worked closely with the National Park Service. The visitor center was the site of the WWII Kaiser shipyards and the birthplace of group health care in the U.S. I developed displays and interpretation on the WWII home front, a remarkable period of history and included many “forgotten” events and people.
Bessie’s story is not one of them.
Digging into it revealed that the source was a YouTube video “How One Welder’s ’Ridiculous’ Idea Saved 2,500 Ships From Splitting in Half at Sea,” later titled “This Welder’s Ridiculous Trick Let Them Build Warships in 5 Days Instead of 40” posted 10/23/2025. Its visibility was amplified by a 11/26/2025 article “The Woman Who Changed Welding” in a trade publication, MetalForming Magazine.
I was shocked at the errors in the video, and further surprised that the magazine carried the story without any evident fact-checking or research. MetalForming’s editor stood by his writer’s story, without explanation.
What was wrong with this story? Here’s the short version.
1. There’s no claimed YouTube authorship beyond “@WW2ColdSecrets” – no human claiming to have written the text or produced the video.
2. Statements about the problem are alarmist and incorrect. A key document that was not cited was the 1947 Final Report on a Board of Investigation to Inquire into the Design and methods of Construction of Welded Steel Merchant Vessels. Their review of the 4,694 merchant vessels built during the war, only 25 sustained a complete fracture of the “strength deck” or bottom. Of those, eight were lost at sea and two – including the Schenectady – broke in two but were not lost. And the human cost? A total of 26 lives were lost due to structural failures. The commission concluded that locked-in stresses did not contribute materially to the failure of welded ships.
3. Statements about “Bessie Hamill” the heroic yet unknown welder are unverifiable. No obituary, no interviews, no documents. Without those, where did this story come from? “She requested a meeting with facility supervisors” – how does @WW2ColdSecrets know that? Bessie’s shipyard supervisor’s commendation letter? Not shown. Years ago I digitized the Kaiser Richmond shipyard newspapers, and they are full of feel-good stories about workers and their innovations. Women welders were a featured item. Nothing resembling the Hamill story appears.
4. There are no footnotes, only sources unattached to statements. And those sources do not support the claims made. For example, “Oral History Collections, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley — Rosie the Riveter WWII Oral History Project” contains no references to “Bessie” or this sequence of events. “The SS Schenectady: Broken Ship, Broken Welds” (Naval Engineers Journal, 1990) by John Gamon Soucy does not seem exist; the only related article by this journal was from 1943 – “Structural Failure of The Tanker: S.S. Schenectady” Journal of the American Society for Naval Engineers, 55: 358-361
I even went down a rabbit hole with a blogger on X who also repeated the story. After a lot of correspondence “NFADLR” backed off, posting “There are a few historical women named Bessie Hamill (or similar spellings) in records, including some from earlier or later periods, but the welder associated with shipbuilding innovation is the one featured in these accounts. Some online discussions debate exact details or whether the story has been slightly mythologized over time, but the core narrative of a female welder’s welding-sequence insight aiding ship production is widely shared. Her story fits into the broader history of women in wartime industry and serves as an example of how observation and experimentation can drive engineering improvements.”
And there are other examples. A story was recently posted on the anonymously-produced social media site “Old American Life” with the title “The Typing Pool That Saved the Shipyard, 1943.” It’s another in the genre of clickbait history items, a cool and compelling WWII home front piece about forgotten heroes. Unfortunately, it’s pure fakery.
– It alludes to sabotage at the Kaiser Richmond shipyard, but the only known such act was this one.
– It tells about how a diligent typing pool worker recreated a whole Liberty ship blueprint from memory, hull #726. The problem? There is no record of such a ship from the Richmond, or any, shipyard.
– The photo is clearly an AI fake – note how the typewriters face the wrong way.
Why am I so disturbed by this? The “Typing pool” and Hamill stories should be uplifting and empowering feminist examples. The WWII home front was high water mark for women in the trades, with equal pay for equal work the law of the land. It was not perfect, and women were not treated well in many ways, but this fabricated narrative is speculative fiction posing as historical fact. I’m utterly baffled as to why these fake histories were produced.
On the other hand, the aforementioned Atlantic article about the Women Airforce Service Pilots, despite the title change, is an excellent example of serious journalism exposing real history that is actively being hidden from us. “The WASPs risked their lives flying for the Army. But for decades, the U.S. government refused to recognize their military service.”
The Atlantic article is by my daughter. Her grandmother Pat Perry flew military planes in the continental U.S. so that male pilots could fight in Europe and the Pacific, but they were not in the military. They were not treated well by the government then, or now. Anti-“woke” efforts have sought to erase them from our history.
Last year I asked the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force why their webpage “1946 Army Air Forces Historical Study No. 55: Women Pilots with the AAF, 1941-1944” 404’d, and was told “Our website is currently being migrated to a new server. In this process, some links may no longer be available until the process is complete. We anticipate full functionality in the near future.” It’s still not there.
Three stories about unsung women’s service during World War II, two vastly different approaches to journalism.
WWII propaganda encouraged citizens to be vigilant. It’s still good advice.
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A Working-Class Hero Is Something To Be
By Steve Early and Rand Wilson
Rutgers Labor Center Celebrates
Life & Legacy of Tony Mazzocchi
In 1948, the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills published a book called The New Men of Power, which examined the careers of post-war labor leaders who emerged from industrial union struggles in the 1930s. At the time, the author was hopeful that labor’s progressive wing—led by this new generation of trade unionists—would be a bulwark against war, militarism, and resurgent corporate power.
A decade later, Mills became a cheerleader for the emerging student movement because the “main drift” of organized labor and most of its officialdom in the 1950s was trending in a conservative direction. That was symbolized by the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) purge of left-wing unions representing a million workers. This paved the way for its mid-1950s merger with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) an alliance in which craft union influence was predominant.
One individual exception to this generational trajectory was the career of a World War II veteran from Brooklyn named Tony Mazzocchi. In the 1950s and 60s, Mazzocchi rose through the ranks of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (OCAW), a union with then strong CIO traditions of rank-and-file activism and internal democracy. While Mills welcomed the revival of campus radicalism in his famous 1960 “Letter to the New Left,” mainstream unions were very hostile, then and later, to any migration of New Leftists from college campuses to unionized workplaces.
The stodgy, insular, cold warriors at AFL-CIO headquarters viewed the growing militancy of the civil rights, antiwar, Black Power, environmental, and feminist movements as a big political threat.
Only a few longtime working-class leaders welcomed Sixties’ activists into the ranks of labor. Tony Mazzocchi was one of the most influential among them. His personal mentoring enabled many former students to become more effective organizers, contract negotiators, strike leaders, and advocates for independent political action.
An Influential Mentor
In singular fashion, Mazzocchi developed a wide following outside his own union. As his biographer, labor educator Les Leopold explains, “Tony was a kindhearted soul with an earthy, self-deprecating sense of humor. Unlike so many people who rise to union leadership, he did not have an ego you constantly had to tiptoe around.” Those qualities alone made him the premier political mensch of the labor left, for four decades, until his death in 2002.
Nearly a quarter century after 2002
Nearly a quarter century later, several hundred friends, allies, and former co-workers of Mazzochi are coming together at the Rutgers University Labor Center on June 4-5, for an in-depth discussion of his life and legacy. (For schedule and registration information.) As recounted well in Leopold’s 2007 biography, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor, Mazzocchi was both a role model and catalyst for progressive activism around multiple issues.
As an OCAW local president and regional leader in New York, legislative director in Washington, and later the union’s national secretary-treasurer, Mazzocchi managed to juggle day-to-day union responsibilities with a tireless commitment to civil rights, labor-based environmentalism, job safety reform, single-payer health care, nuclear disarmament, and union democracy. He was a leading architect of the fight for a federal Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) in 1972, warranting Leopold’s description of him as “the Rachel Carson of the American workplace.”
Working Class Roots
Unlike many of his later fans who were middle-class baby boomers, Mazzocchi was shaped by his childhood experience during the Depression, followed by Army service in the Battle of the Bulge. He came from a boisterous, pro-labor Italian-American family in Bensonhurst, a Brooklyn neighborhood later known for its white working-class conservatism and residents with mob ties.
Mazzocchi’s two sisters and a closeted gay uncle were Communist Party (CP) members. Despite growing up in that milieu, Tony never joined the CP. As Leopold reports, Mazzocchi regarded “formal Marxism and its terminology to be too doctrinaire.”
He was more influenced by left-wingers with a popular touch. He actively supported Congressman Vito Marcantonio’s unsuccessful 1949 campaign for N.Y.C. mayor as an American Labor Party candidate. According to Mazzocchi’s biographer, the young World War II veteran “watched and learned how Marc carefully serviced his base, while also staking out radical positions. Not only did he care for ‘workers’ as a political category — he cared for his constituents personally.”
Mazzocchi took the same approach when he got a job at a Queens cosmetics factory in 1950 and became a union activist. Local 149 at Helena Rubinstein was then affiliated with the United Gas, Coke and Chemical Workers (which merged with the Oil Workers to became OCAW five years later). As a union shop steward, organizer, and eventually president, Mazzocchi tripled his local’s size. He built a strong cadre of shop floor leaders, started a book club and credit union, and sponsored a “vast array of social activities” that “combined to create a remarkable new spirit at work.”
As Leopold recounts: “In stark contrast with much of the labor movement in the mid-1950s, Local 149 championed the rising civil rights movement — even though its membership was 95 percent white.”
War and Peace
In 1957, Mazzocchi helped launched the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) to oppose atom bomb testing. His longtime involvement with SANE put him in touch with the “leading scientists, environmentalists, and activists who would later join him building an occupational safety and health movement.”
When the Rubenstein plant relocated outside the city, Mazzocchi’s membership became a force in local politics and a reliable source of strike solidarity in the suburbs. By the mid-1960s, Mazzocchi was mobilizing against job cuts at military contractors on Long Island with a union-drafted plan “to use defense workers’ vast skills to build public buses and subway cars.”
Aided by economist and fellow SANE activist Seymour Melman, this pioneering promotion of “economic conversion” won Mazzocchi a White House audience with Lyndon Johnson in 1964. That same year, he almost ran for Congress — a move thwarted by Democratic Party officials who looked askance at his peace activities and feared they would be redbaited along with him.
Mazzocchi’s aspirations for higher office were partially fulfilled, instead, within the 200,000-member OCAW. In 1965, he helped elect a new national union president, after a bitter struggle with top OCAW officials linked to CIA meddling in foreign labor movements. This victory made Tony the union’s legislative/political director.
Job Safety and Health
In that capacity, Mazzocchi linked emerging public concern about environmental pollution to the source of the problem — workplaces where OCAW members and other workers were exposed to toxic chemicals at much higher levels than anyone in surrounding communities. In the era before OSHA and the Environmental Protection Act (EPA), as Leopold points out: “There were no effective standards. There was no enforcement. The corporations ruled as absolute monarchs over chemical production, exposure, and regulation.”
At Mazzocchi’s initiative, organized labor began to shift its own focus, from a traditional emphasis on job safety (i.e. protection against injuries) to dealing with the long-term health effects of occupational hazards. His method involved rank-and-file consciousness raising and grassroots coalition building, outside the Beltway.
A high-school dropout himself, Mazzocchi recruited a high-powered network of medical researchers to provide documentation for lawsuits, reports, press releases, hearing testimony and investigative reporting. He regularly dispatched these allies to probe for the causes of job illnesses reported by his membership.
At the same time, he organized non-stop “road shows” that brought workers together with friendly experts and forced lawmakers to listen to both of them. Mazzocchi’s drive for passage of the Occupational Health and Safety Act in 1972 is a case study in building effective labor clout, albeit in an era when legislative gains were still possible even under a Republican president.
The Silkwood Case
In that same decade, OCAW tried to help rank-and-file whistle-blowers like Karen Silkwood in Oklahoma. She worked at a dangerous nuclear facility operated by Kerr-McGee and died under suspicious circumstances in a 1974 car crash. That occurred when Silkwood was on her way to meet a New York Times reporter–an interview arranged by Steve Wodka, a close collaborator of Mazzzocchi’s and now a contributor to Capitol Hill Citizen. (For more on that famous case, see Meryl Streep’s moving performance in the 1983 film Silkwood.)
As an integral part of what Leopold calls “the atomic-industrial complex,” OCAW dues payers in the nuclear industry proved to be Mazzocchi’s own Achilles heel. When he decided to run for national union president in 1979 and 1981, conservative opponents — critical of his “anti-nuke” politics and “incessant boat-rocking” — mobilized against him. In both hotly contested convention elections, he suffered heartbreakingly narrow defeats.
Tony confounded his foes, per usual, by making an unexpected political comeback. In the late 1980s he reconciled with Bob Wages, the last president of OCAW before it merged with the Paper Workers and then the United Steel Workers. Mazzocchi returned to the OCAW leadership as national secretary-treasurer again. This time, he used that post to promote worker education initiatives like Les Leopold’s Labor Institute and, with far more obstacles, a new labor-based third party.
A Party for Labor?
After four years of preparatory work, the Labor Party got off to a promising start in 1996 due to growing rank-and-file disillusionment with the Clinton Administration. Its founding convention in Cleveland drew fourteen hundred delegates, including rank-and-file activists, local officers, some national union officials, and labor-oriented academics like author and historian Adolph Reed, a speaker at the Rutgers conference in early June.
During the LP’s early years, Mazzocchi helped generate much of its labor funding and support, through relentless personal barnstorming around the country. Unfortunately, dreary and divisive left sectarian squabbles soon paralyzed some chapters. A substantive disagreement about when to start running viable independent candidates—and at what level of government– was never satisfactorily resolved.
After CHC publisher Ralph Nader, Tony’s longtime friend and ally, made his Green Party run for the presidency in 2000, the mainstream union backlash against alleged third party “spoilers” further complicated LP recruitment efforts. The authors of this piece and other “Labor for Nader” supporters did grassroots turn-out for Ralph’s famous “super-rallies” in Boston and other cities. But only two LP affiliates–the United Electrical Workers (UE) and California Nurses Association—officially endorsed his campaign, not the LP itself.
The electoral college (and Supreme Court-assisted) victory of George Bush in 2000 and resulting Republican attacks on labor tended to drive unions back into the Democratic Party fold. Other LP sponsors, including OCAW’s new parent organization, withdrew their support. In 2007, the LP folded its tent.
As two key LP organizers, Mark Dudzic and Katherine Isaac, summed up the experience five years later: “the prospect of breaking completely with the Democratic Party without an established alternative was too risky for even the most militant unions and remains the biggest challenge to any effort to build an independent labor politics.”
It should be noted that, even within the Democratic Party, only seven national unions, representing just a million workers, dared to embrace the pro-labor presidential primary campaign of Bernie Sanders in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was the leadership choice of the AFL-CIO, SEIU, and big independent unions like the National Education Association.
Mazzocchi’s Legacy
Tony didn’t live to see it but, two years ago, former local union president and strike leader Dan Osborn proved, without a doubt, that Nebraska is one state ready for a labor-backed independent candidate. After an unexpectedly strong showing in his 2024 U.S. Senate race against a MAGA Republican incumbent, Osborn is making a second run against another one this year, as the CHC reported in its February-March issue.
From MassCOSH in Boston to Work Safe in the Bay Area, local occupational safety and health coalitions which Tony helped foster, continue to support job safety and health fights. Antiwar agitation by U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW) and Veterans and Labor for Sensible Priorities still reprise the role played by the Vietnam-era Labor for Peace, which Mazzocchi supported.
Under Tony’s influence in the 1980s, OCAW sponsored a Boston Organizing Project, which placed “salts” in non-union workplaces. The much bigger 21st century successors to that effort include the SEIU-backed Starbucks Workers United, Amazon warehouse worker organizing efforts by the Teamsters, and the Rank-and-File Project, which has a multi-industry focus and helpers from DSA and Labor Notes.
The Labor Institute, an independent labor education and research project that Mazzocchi helped start in the mid-70s, continues to issues studies on economic inequality and provide health and safety training for unions, immigrant workers, and disaster clean-up crews.
Two key Labor Party demands—single payer health coverage and “Higher Ed for All”—the latter inspired by Mazzocchi’s own experience with the original GI Bill—didn’t gain enough traction in the 1990s. But both became a programmatic centerpiece of two Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020, as former California Nurses Association leader RoseAnn DeMoro will remind the Rutgers conference crowd.
As Les Leopold, also a Rutgers conference organizer, points out, Mazzocchi always raised hopes and expectations by “conjuring up a labor movement that didn’t really exist, but just might.” And that “movement would be militant and green. It would bring about radical changes that would stop global warming. It would give workers real control over the quality and pace of work and over corporate investment decisions. It would champion the fight against militarism and for peace and equality. It would win free health care. It would dare to create a new political party to counter the corporate domination of the two major parties.”
In a period of declining union density and Trump-related defensive crouches, few union leaders today project anything like this expansive vision. The two-day event at Rutgers will begin with panels and workshops featuring speakers who worked with Tony or whose current organizing was inspired by him. It will also include a more “interactive, worker-centered, action-centered day of strategizing, learning from the lessons of the past and applying them to the present and future.”
The conference will officially unveil the Tony Mazzocchi Archive, to be permanently housed at the Rutgers Labor Center. It will feature, not just OCAW-related documents, but a wide-ranging oral history project, capturing the voices of workers influenced by the visionary leadership and pragmatic radicalism that Brother Tony personally embodied.
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Mayhaps: May Day and the Rebirth of Labor’s Imagination
By Fred Glass
For many years I taught labor history at night to working students at City College of San Francisco. Since Bay Area workers and their unions had carried out two consequential general strikes (San Francisco in 1934, and Oakland in 1946), each semester I assigned my pupils an essay question: Is it possible—or even desirable—for our region’s workers, if faced with oppressive circumstances, to replicate those feats today?
My students’ essays appeared along a range of responses between two poles. On one end, no, not possible, even if desirable, due to changed conditions like suburban distances between home and workplace, along with the decline of union density. On the other, yes, both desirable and possible, because new communications technologies allow ideas and organizing to spread rapidly online, and labor’s steep decline means that workers are angry enough to make it happen. Few students in either camp thought it would be an easy lift, reflecting a general sense of limited horizons for labor-led progressive change in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.
The 1946 Oakland General Strike was the very last one American workers had managed to put together, literally a lifetime ago. But metaphorically, post-January 23, 2026, we might now be onto a new calendar. In the wake of the powerful “No Work, No School, No Shopping” day that erupted in the Twin Cities, alongside a steady drumbeat of growing demonstrations and electoral successes against the Trump regime, there’s wind in the sails for mass action on May Day 2026.
Just in my neck of the woods many events have already taken place, and more are on the boards, combining planning, training and coalition building for that once-unpopular holiday, officially observed in one hundred or so nations across the globe, but not in the country that birthed it. I hear from a friend in Minneapolis that he’s been going to meetings attended by hundreds of people dedicated in a serious way to making May 1 another day of action.
We shouldn’t underestimate the significance of what happened January 23. In the midst of a brutal occupation by poorly trained, heavily armed troops operating with seeming impunity on behalf of their fascist mission of ethnic cleansing, the ordinary people of Minneapolis organized themselves to defend their streets, their democratic rights, their immigrant neighbors, and their idea of a decent society to demand “ICE out!”. Somewhere around 75,000 people showed up on a cold Minnesota winter day to freeze the gears of the local economy and the occupation.
It was pretty close to a general strike, and unlike all the other dozen-plus city-wide general strikes in American history it was waged not around an economic struggle between workers and bosses, but on behalf of a political idea, more like what happens every so often in other countries. Which is very much in the spirit of May Day.
Tools are there to be found
Doing such things will not suddenly become easier. The Minnesota circumstances are unique, with an unprecedented level of assault running into a recent baseline increase in labor-community alliance and activism. The ICE invasion reignited the embers of powerful alliance – building and union contract victories that peaked in 2024.
But every city has its own local history, culture and traditions of collective action, and despite the diminished capacities of the labor movement, the tools are there to be found — providing they are sought out seriously.
One hurdle is the legitimate fear of labor leadership over legal consequences for calling a general strike, forbidden by the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, a federal legislative backlash by the Republican controlled Congress against the 1946 strike wave. Unions can be fined, and labor leaders jailed for overtly calling for sympathy strikes. Thus while mostly supportive behind the scenes, unions were muted in their participation in the May 1 2006 “Day Without Immigrants” demonstrations and the November 2011 “Day of Action” in Oakland that shut down the docks and shuttered many businesses in support of Occupy Oakland’s call for a general strike.
January 23 in Minneapolis-St. Paul showed the general strike tactic is no longer solely in the rear view mirror.
Making distinctions
In Minneapolis unions and labor federations advanced the ball down that field without quite uttering the words “general strike”, although everyone was pretty clear what “No Work, No School, No Shopping” meant. Which brings us to the distinction between what Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch termed ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ utopias. Both contain the hope for something better than what we’ve got, and both can propose action to get us from here to there. But an abstract utopia fails to marshal full consideration of the many-sided realities that need to be navigated in order to arrive at a successful endpoint. A concrete utopia pays attention to what Marx was getting at in his Introduction to the Grundrisse when he noted that “The truth is concrete; hence, unity of the diverse.”
What didn’t do that? The cry immediately after January 23 by various individuals and organizations to replicate “No work, no school, no shopping” nation-wide a week later on January 30, which predictably fizzled, absent the hard work of analysis and organizing that produced January 23.
What did do that? In the background, helping to set the stage for Minneapolis, was United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain’s call—issued in 2023—for unions across the country to line up their contracts for common expiration on May 1 2028. Here was a call not to have a general strike, but to organize one. A concrete utopia is one that bridges the gap between the current unsatisfactory situation and the desired outcome with appropriate tactics, strategies, and inspiration—and above all, with a clear-eyed picture of and willingness to do the work needed in the timeframe needed to do it.
We may be learning that there is nothing like a dose of fascism to clarify the minds of labor and other progressive movement leaders. Besides all-but-calling a general strike, and getting onto the May Day train, unions around the country have been stepping up ‘tax the rich’ efforts at the state and local levels and signing onto coalitions supporting socialists running for office. Not everywhere, but you’ve got to start somewhere, and it seems to be starting. There are some 250 democratic socialists in office today in the United States, the most since the heyday of the Socialist Party in the early twentieth century, nearly all elected with union support. The imagination of the labor movement, perhaps not coincidentally mostly slumbering since the 1946 strike wave, is waking up.
The direct confrontation with fascism experienced in places like the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and elsewhere is not everywhere. Where it’s happening it’s real and deadly serious, on the wrong end of weapons wielded by our government against its own citizens. Fascists are occupying the federal government apparatus, and as they are wont to do, they are stripping it of its helping functions and shifting resources to the repressive functions. But the occupation is being contested. Civil society is the playing field, and democracy is still in play.
Mayhaps
May Day has always been about collective imagination—to be precise, workers imagining a new world, one in which they will be in charge. This act of collective imagining involves another pairing, not the same as but rhyming with the concrete/abstract utopias distinction: individual imagination and fantasy. In psychoanalytic terms, fantasy is a regressive and often self-destructive escape from reality, a defensive flight toward would-be omnipotent control, but only in one’s head. The ultra-left posturing that goes into a call for a general strike without regard to material circumstances is a good example. Imagination, by contrast, actively and creatively engages the work necessary to move from internal conception to making something actually happen — like lining up our contracts to expire on the same day, May Day 2028, with a timeline matched to the magnitude of the task.
Fain’s concrete utopia also rhymes with how May Day began. Following the execution of the Haymarket martyrs in Chicago, the Socialist International declared a day of commemoration, with demonstrations in every country for the eight-hour work-day, the cause for which the Chicago labor leaders were put to death. Wisely, the call did not impose a one-size-fits-all set of instructions, but instead suggested that each country assess its situation and determine what sort of demonstrations made sense in their own context. The results ranged from weekend marches to general strikes. In some places, over the years, the marches became general strikes, May First became a workers’ holiday, and the labor movement achieved the shorter workday.
For eight decades in this country we’ve done the weekend marches, not the general strikes, the door to which has been shut tight. The people of Minneapolis showed us something remarkable on January 23 — that with the work that accompanies imagination, it just might be possible to crack the door open and let the light through.
Minneapolis isn’t everywhere, nor should we expect it to be — like Mamdani’s victory could happen because it happened in New York, and New York also isn’t everywhere. But both events show us that something different is possible when collective imagination is fired by the vision of a better world, and the vision is matched with the work it takes to get there.
On May 1 2026 we’ll be testing how far along we are on the path to the mass actions necessary to push back the fascist tide. We should expect the results to be uneven, but we can learn from them and thus be stronger as we head toward the next rounds of struggle.
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This piece originally ran in California DSA