Scope and Contents

Most materials in this series focus on Local 100, the TWU's New York City local representing bus and subway workers, but also included are segments concerning the international union and its Railroad and Air Transport divisions, as well as Locals 101 (Brooklyn Union Gas utility workers) and 234 (Philadelphia transit workers). They are drawn from the following materials, all produced by or for the union: seven documentaries, United We Are Invincible(1941) ;  Our Case For The Forty-Hour Week(1950),  The Transport Workers Union of America, CIO, Presents Proceedings Of Its Seventh Biennial Convention(1950),  Memorial Tribute To Mr. CIO—Allan S. Haywood(1953);  Twenty-Nine Days To Victory(1953),  Years Of Challenge(1961), and  The Best Is Yet To Come(1967), as well as programs, press conferences, and filmed press releases broadcast on television (including national conventions and locals' mass meetings, officers' reports to locals and national divisions, and reports to the public on its actions). The largest number of segments consist outtakes from the completed films and television program, as well as unedited footage.

The films in this series include many hours of footage of the TWU's ebullient, truculent, theatrical and colorful long-time president, Michael J. Quill. These present a visual record of his life and career, from young and sprightly in the 1930s (including a rally during his successful 1939 campaign to be elected to the New York City Council) to aging and ill, being jailed during the disastrous 1966 New York City transit strike, and, only weeks later, his funeral cortege emerging from New York City's St. Patrick's Cathedral, and including glimpses of his family, his son, John Quill, as well as his wives, Mollie (O'Neill) Quill and Shirley (Garry) Quill. Quill's fiery oratory, sharp tongue, shrewd wit, and agile repartee is on display here, including his trademark threat, that the union would stay on the picket line "until the plains of hell itself freeze over"; his calling one of New York City's mayors "a plain, ordinary, common liar"; and many instances of his rhetorically skewering his opponents (in management, in politics, and within his own union) in person and in the media. The series also includes other TWU officers and staff, including: Eugene Attreed, Gustav Faber, Maurice Forge, Daniel Gilmartin, William Grogan, Matthew Guinan, Austin Hogan, James Horst, Andrew Kaelin, Mark Kavanaugh, Matthew Kearns, Douglas MacMahon, Frank O'Connor, John O'Donnell, Harry Sacher, John Santo, James Shannon, Frank Sheehan, and Ellis Van Riper.

TWU footage also includes prominent leaders of other unions and national labor organizations, such as the CIO's John L. Lewis, Philip Murray and Allan Haywood, the AFL-CIO's George Meany, Joseph Curran of the National Maritime Union, David J. MacDonald of the United Steel Workers, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters' James R. Hoffa (who can be seen promising not to raid TWU locals); officials of New York City and State AFL-CIO councils, including Raymond Diana, Louis Hollander, Morris Iushewitz, Martin Lacey, and Harry Van Arsdale, Jr. Other labor-related figures represented include Arthur Goldberg, a labor lawyer whose clients included the TWU before he became United States Secretary of Labor and later a United States Supreme Court Justice; noted labor arbitrator, Theodore Kheel; labor negotiator, Julius Manson and "labor priest," Father Charles Owen Rice of Pittsburgh. Politicians and officials are represented, too: New York City mayors Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert F. Wagner, Jr.; New York City Transit Authority commissioners John J. Gilhooley and Joseph E. O' Grady, and Philadelphia mayors Joseph S. Clark, Jr., Richardson Dilworth, and James Hugh Joseph Tate. Also worth noting are persons who are not on-screen, but are mentioned, usually with invective. Rudolph Halley, president of the New York City Council, New York City mayor Vincent Impellitteri, New York City Comptroller Lawrence E. Gerosa, New York State governor Thomas E. Dewey, and anti-union, anti-communist lawyer Roy Cohn, all get their share of this treatment.

Other footage includes mass meetings, rallies, demonstrations, Labor Day parades (which document other unions' contingents as well as the TWU's), contract negotiations, press conferences, picket lines, strikes, and speeches, beginning with the early days of the TWU in the 1930s and 1940s (including its attendance at a 1943 national CIO convention); TWU participation in World War II "United Front" activities such as a huge 1942 "Defend America" rally, with US and Soviet flags side by side on the podium and buses bearing slogans like, "Uncle Sam Won't Miss the Bus—Lick Hitler in 1942; and the expulsion of Communist Party members from the union six years later. Also shown are members at work: bus drivers, subway conductors and motormen, utility workers, baggage handlers and airplane maintenance mechanics, flight attendants, railroad train maintenance workers, and gas utility workers. The ethnic makeup of TWU's officers and members, many of them of Irish extraction, is reflected in footage of TWU officers and members participating in New York City's annual St. Patrick's Day parade; footage of members and officers of other ethnic groups, including African-American officers such as Herman C. Gray, Louis Manning, Edward T. Williamson, and rank and file members in the audience at mass meetings.

Also among these materials are: a long speech given by Michael Quill at the union's 30th anniversary meeting in 1964, in which he discusses the TWU's and his relationship with the Communist Party, as well as what may be the earliest footage of an attempted corporate takeover and proxy fight, as Quill and the TWU went toe-to-toe over the management of the Fifth Avenue Bus Company – represented by Lawrence Weissman, Harry Weinberg, and Roy Cohn -- in 1962. (This sequence includes candid footage in which some participants are clearly not aware of being filmed.) And while there is no footage directly showing dissidents against the TWU's entrenched leadership, documentation of these groups and individuals is not entirely absent. It is manifested in Quill's shouting down union dissidents from the podium, in his direct as well as oblique (uncomplimentary) references to them at mass meetings, and in his testy response to questions from reporters about wildcat strikes within the union; and it can be heard in occasional catcalls from the TWU convention floor.

The series also includes informal and candid scenes of working-class social life of the 1940s and 50s, for example, color footage of union officers and members with spouses and children, dressed in their Sunday best, attending an annual "Field Day" in Croke Park in the Bronx; the union's "11th annual outing," replete with drum and bagpipe bands, pony rides, clowns, hotdogs, beer, ice cream, and competitive athletic events such as softball, soccer, high jump, horse shoes, shot put, foot races; footage of a racially integrated holiday party showing adults smoking and drinking; and a banquet celebration.

Scope and Contents

This series features a wide range of materials documenting individuals and organizations associated with the three main strands of left-radical political philosophies, political parties, and culture: Communism, Socialism, and Anarchism, including a biographical portrait (released in the early 1930s) of United States Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, with footage of Debs, his wife and his brother; a 1936 newsreel produced by Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo-Federacion Anarquista de Iberica (National Confederation of Labor-Iberian Anarchist Federation," CNT-FAI) and narrated in English by prominent American anarchist exile, Emma Goldman (one of two known extant recordings of the famous orator's voice) of the funeral of the Spanish Civil War anarchist militia leader, Buenaventura Durruti, with footage of Durruti in life, as well as anarchists and members of the Republican Government attending the funeral; the pleasures of Camp Tamiment, a Socialist summer resort in the Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains, with young adults engaged in a wide range of vigorous outdoor recreational activities and clowning, as well as appearances by Bertha Mailly, Ben Josephson and Algernon Lee, Socialist Party stalwarts and moving spirits and supporters of the Socialist Party-associated Rand School of Social Science; playful scenes from a picnic held by the Hungarian branch of the (U.S. Communist Party-sponsored) International Workers Order; a 1938 May Day Parade (in color and in black and white) in New York City, featuring contingents, floats, banners, and signs with a multiplicity of slogans on contemporary issues, representing the CPUSA and a broad spectrum of Communist Party-associated or left-leaning labor unions and other organizations.

Organizational life and activities of the New York City-based labor union, District 65-UAW, including a televised membership meeting of department store employees considering a strike, with union president, David Livingston, leading the discussion; a rally (co-sponsored with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) held in New York City's garment district to protest the murder of Emmett Till, and a short government-sponsored film about an art show by union members.

The American and international umbrella labor organizations, the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), and International Labour Organisation (ILO), including a 1920s film about the ILO with exterior and interiors of its headquarters and officials in Geneva, Switzerland; a small amount of footage from the 1935 International Labor Conference, held in Geneva, with a few seconds of the American delegation to the Conference containing what may be the only existing moving images of Grace Abbott (American social reformer, teacher, and writer and colleague of Jane Addams at Hull House); and the Jewish Labor Committee-produced film, Nos Maisons d'Enfants(1949), shot in France (and narrated in Yiddish) to support the JLC's activities on behalf orphaned or destitute Jewish child survivors of World War II.

Progressive American politicians (mainly from New York City and state), including election campaign speeches, appearances at various events, and endorsements of New York governor Herbert H. Lehman, New York City mayors Fiorello H. La Guardia, William O' Dwyer, Robert F. Wagner, Jr.; city councilmen Paul O'Dwyer and Abraham Beame; and television interviews with United States senator Wayne L. Morse.

Daily life of poor and working-class children and adults in New York City during the Great Depression, shot by photographer John Albok in black and white and color, including shoeshine boys, children selling flowers, children diving for pennies in the East River, street dancers, and pushcart vendors, homeless African-American adults living under elevated subway train tracks, hungry people rummaging through garbage, and most unique, the JLC-sponsored 1936 "Counter-Olympics" - the World Labor Athletic Carnival, a two-day event held at the City's Randall's Island to protest the holding of the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany.