Organize the Unorganized: Is There an End to the CIO?
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 5 March 2024
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The eighth, penultimate episode of Organize the Unorganized concludes the main story of the CIO. We cover the organization’s communist purge in the late 1940s and Operation Dixie, the failed campaign to organize workers in the south. We end with the merger with the AFL in 1955 and the afterlife of the CIO in the Industrial Union Department, which made important contributions to the civil rights movement.
Listen to the final, ninth episode here: https://shows.acast.com/jacobin-radio/episodes/organize-the-unorganized-09-lessons
Find all the episodes on the web, or by searching for "Organize the Unorganized" on your podcast app.
Organize the Unorganized: The Rise of the CIO is a limited-run history podcast telling the story of the CIO through the voices of labor historians. Hosted by Benjamin Y. Fong and produced by the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University with Jacobin. Find the full show notes for this episode here: https://soundcloud.com/organizetheunorganized/episode-8-is-there-an-ending-to-the-cio
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I guess you remember reading in the newspapers last fall how some communists were kicked out of the |
| 0:06.0 | CIO when they tried to push the American worker into following a country like Russia. |
| 0:11.0 | I sure do remember that, that George and always was kind of curious |
| 0:15.5 | about just what happened there. Well is what happened Bill. We have the CIO |
| 0:22.1 | don't give a row of beans you, for what people want to think for themselves. |
| 0:27.0 | If they're crazy enough to want to believe in communism, well, we're not going to stop them. |
| 0:34.0 | When they start hurting the American labor movement, |
| 0:38.0 | that's when CIO draws a line. |
| 0:40.0 | And for the last 10 years, those communists have done just about everything bad they could think to try to kill labor in this country. |
| 0:49.0 | They told lies and misled the people and even tried to get in the vote in elections against the right kind of candidates. |
| 0:56.0 | At the CIO Convention last November, the Communist stood up and screamed things that the CIO leaders, which if they had been in Russia, |
| 1:05.0 | well they've just been taken out and shot for doing it. |
| 1:09.0 | Yes, Bill, they took advantage of the freedoms we have in order to take those freedoms away from us. |
| 1:15.0 | But let me tell you, they didn't get the first base. |
| 1:19.0 | As a matter of fact, after hitting all those foul balls they struck out. The six million |
| 1:25.3 | members of the CIO through their delegates at the convention voted to kick the |
| 1:30.2 | communist out. And since the CIO is a Democratic organization, all the members through |
| 1:36.2 | their delegates made their will known, and their will was done. |
| 1:40.3 | Well, George, I sure am right proud of this country. In fact, right at this minute, I'm |
| 1:46.2 | about to pop a shirt button with pride in the American workers and the CIO because they knew |
| 1:51.3 | enough to protect us and all of our liberties. |
| 1:54.0 | Welcome to Organize the Unorganized. |
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