Communism, the cold war, and a company town: the rise and fall of UE Local 709

Abstract

This case study of the dissolution of United Electrical Workers Local 709 at the Hoover Company in North Canton, Ohio, demonstrates that the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) national leadership's ties to international Communism played a major role in the collapse of progressive unionism in the post-World War II era. The article reveals that while the UE's stance on anti-Communist affidavits may have been righteous from a civil liberties standpoint, it left UE loyalists with almost no chance to win a contentious 1948 strike. The Hoover Company, local media, and dissident workers were able to use the Communist issue to divide the membership. In addition, the actions of the Soviet Union after World War II discredited Communism as a counterforce to capitalism, and the UE leadership's continued alignment with the Communist Party severely damaged the UE's legitimacy. This work builds on a growing body of scholarship that denounces cold war hysteria, but shows that Communists in unions contributed to their own demise because of their inability to separate morally and politically bankrupt Stalinism from their socialist goals.

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