A GREAT AMERICAN HAS DIED, aged 97, and to the disgrace of our national media, he will not be appropriately honored. Rather, even in death, Roy M. Brewer, former leader of the Hollywood Stagehands Union, has been and will be vilified, as heroes are often defamed in an age marked by apologetics for immorality.
Known in showbiz as "the IA," the Stagehands remain one of the most powerful cinema labor organizations. Their official title is the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists, and Allied Crafts (IATSE, AFL-CIO). Once they absorbed the motion picture projectionists' union, they rose from a fading remnant of the early American labor movement to become the dominant representative of filmdom's vast armies of craft workers.
But the road was rough. In the 1940s, Stalinist Communists openly proclaimed their goal of controlling all unions on the U.S. West Coast, and had made the takeover of Hollywood labor a major tactical aim. The California Commies had plenty of money and plenty of clout, since the Soviet Union considered the Pacific region as important as Europe and the Atlantic in its drive for world domination. Moscow's agents had already seized control of a major section of the California Democratic party.
Four men then stood like tall, strong trees--unbending and deeply-rooted in their unions--providing an insurmountable barrier to Russian domination of the American labor movement. There was David Dubinsky of the garment workers, a veteran of armed combat by
Jewish workers against the terror of the tsar and the Black Hundreds--the al-Qaida of their day--in Poland. Dubinsky's platform was firm: he would never unite with Communists, their friends and admirers, or their "progressive" and Democrat stooges. Second in line was a stern Norwegian social democrat, Harry Lundeberg of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific, a veteran rank-and-file organizer. He hated the Communists with the same loathing that Dubinsky harbored, and for the same reason: both had seen the old, idealistic European socialism betrayed by Soviet imperialists. Next came Walter Reuther, a solid son of German and American socialism, who had actually worked in a Soviet auto plant before he came back to the industrial hell of Detroit to organize auto assembly line "shop rats." Reuther was beaten bloody by the company guards of the Ford Motor Co. He survived two assassination attempts. And when the time was ripe, after the Second World War had ended and Moscow had begun a new assault on the West and particularly on America, Reuther unceremoniously booted Red officials out of his United Auto Workers.
Few today know how much of the battle for American values in the union movement was carried in California. Lundeberg defeated the Communists by getting better wages and conditions for his members on the waterfront, and Reuther had gone through bruising intraunion battles against the Moscow fifth column in the gigantic southern California aircraft plants. Russia's rodents, neutralized and threatened in the key maritime and defense industries on the coast, had turned their eyes to Hollywood. At that point, only the Screen Writers' Guild was seriously plagued with Communist interference. The Actors' Guild had seen many a rhetorical battle by the Communists, but without much success to show for it. Still, Hollywood was recognized as among the most unionized communities in the world, and a Communist victory there would have had incalculable effects.
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