The Threat to the Labor Movement/Section 28
Accept Policy of Trade Union Officialdom.
THIS policy, hitherto pursued with some caution by the leadership of these unions, has been given a tremendous impetus by the outright pressure of the American Federation officialdom and now converges with the "Baltimore and Ohio" plans, Watson-Parker government mediation (the governor's commission in New York) in war on the sections of the membership which are not under the influence of the socialist party bureaucracy.
Only agreement on main lines of policy could bring such close organizational cooperation as can be seen in New York and elsewhere with Tammany Hall supporters enlisted side by side with the New Leader, the Daily Forward, the needle trade union officialdom and the socialist party bureaucracy against the majority of the membership.
The socialist party leadership is not only "making love to reaction," as Norman Thomas so delightfully puts it, but has long ago lost its virginity, become promiscuous and appears as a hardened old madam whose role is that of procuring new recruits for the house of prostitution where workers are supposed to lose all shame and which is run under the name of "American trade unionism" by the labor agents of imperialism—the Greens, Wolls, Lewises and other lesser lights.