A Remembrance of Gus Tyler

A Remembrance of Gus Tyler

Jo-Ann Mort: A Remembrance of Gus Tyler

It is eerily symbolic that the iconic labor intellectual Gus Tyler was nearly 100 years old when he died on June 3 in Sarasota, Florida, where he had lived since his retirement in his eighties. Gus not only lived for a century, but lived the century: His life spanned the rise and fall of ?big labor? and the great ideologies, of both the left and the right. Gus was at the heart of the action.

Hired by the Forward newspaper in 1932, one year out of New York University, he became assistant to the labor editor Louis Schaefer at a time when hundreds of thousands of Jewish trade unionists would eye the Yiddish socialist paper. He wrote his column for the Forward practically until he died, as well as articles for the New Leader and Dissent.

At the Forward, he met someone who would lead him to the International Ladies? Garment Workers? Union (ILGWU): David Dubinsky, the ladies’ garment workers’ iconic president and a towering figure among immigrant Jews. Dubinsky, a socialist but also a fierce anti-Communist, named Gus ?assistant president? of the union, a title he held through four presidencies at the ILGWU. After the 1995 merger of the ILGWU and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (which became UNITE and then Workers United, now an affiliate of SEIU), there was, alas, no role for an ?assistant president.? Though Gus retired, I was lucky that even in retirement he hung around the union offices. As UNITE?s communications director, I benefited from Gus?s too infrequent visits. Whenever he came, we?d share socialist anecdotes, like two people sharing a secret language?since the days when the garment unions had a socialist soul were long gone.

Gus was a labor intellectual in an era when Jews formed the backbone of the American Left and saw the U.S. labor movement as their brace. Nowhere was this more true than in the garment unions, which, as many readers of Dissent know, traditionally had strong socialist leanings. Barry Gewen, who worked with Gus at the ILGWU and is now an editor at the New York Times Sunday Book Review, told me that ?Gus wasn?t a writer for the ages; he was a partisan and propagandist (in the good sense), and he had a genius for those roles that I?ve rarely seen, and that certainly hasn?t existed in the labor movement since he left it….He really was an intellectual. Or perhaps he was an activist who, unlike most activists, had a genuine appreciation and admiration for ideas.?

In Gus?s heyday, when the garment unions were strong, controlling their industry and making decisions that would help elect U.S. presidents, being a left public intellectual meant supporting the workers? cause. Indeed, the garment unions?and especially the ILGWU?were where the Jewish dream of a life free from the shtetl and the ghetto came alive. Gus, through his writing, articulated that vision for decades of workers who joined together to raise themselves from the working class to the middle class and beyond.

When his union moved away from the socialism of Dubinsky and toward the liberal-democratic ethos of Hubert Humphrey, Gus continued to write the script. He was principled to the core, but he was also ecumenical and nonsectarian, a rare trait in the American Left of the 1960s and 1970s. In those days of dying ideological rifts, differing positions on the Soviet Union too often took on more importance than fighting anti-union employers. Gus didn?t let his anti-Communism stand in the way of a pragmatic fight for working people. A friend of mine, who worked for the ILGWU under both Dubinsky and later union president (Sol) Chick Chaikin, a cold warrior, told me that when Chick threatened to fire her for ?consorting with the enemy? by organizing a rally to support Social Security in conjunction with District 65 (a one-time pro-Communist union), Gus had her back and protected her from Chaikin?s wrath.

Irving Howe once said to me that Gus was ?the only person I know who grows more radical as he grows older.? But, in fact, I think that Gus maintained a very level sense of his socialism?which was more akin to contemporary moderate European social democracy, picked up during his early activism in the Young People?s Socialist League (YPSL) and through his devotion to the garment unions as the religion of the Jewish immigrant class. (Gus?s mother was a sweatshop worker who taught her son to worship socialism like the god that couldn?t fail.)

What I recall mostly about Gus was his energy and his intellect. His Forward columns were well reasoned, but he also wrote as a popularizer, in the best sense of the word. ?When Gus spoke before business groups and other conservative groups,? recalls Barry Gewen, ?he liked to point out that productivity, which was their big thing, did not bear any relationship to employment, and that we could increase productivity without having any impact on jobs, or, in fact, a negative impact. And that seems to be exactly what has happened in the years since the financial crisis. As I was reading the discussion of this phenomenon recently, Gus?s image came to my eyes.?

At the celebration of Norman Thomas?s centennial in 1984, Gus made remarks (reprinted in Dissent) that clarified his own vision of socialism. ?In all the years that I worked with Norman Thomas,? said Gus, ?I never felt that his brand of socialism??Christian socialism??was mine.? Gus said that, along with Christian socialism, utopian and ?scientific? (Marxist) socialism comprised the threads of the socialist movement. Scientific socialism, to which Gus had adhered, was for him

a kind of Newtonian physics applied to the social realm….To us, the mass was the working class; the momentum was the movement; the direction was socialism?.[O]ur focus was not on the exact design of the future nor on the discovery and application of some extraneous ethic but on the ?road to power.? Once the proletariat took over, all else would follow.

However, he continued, he had since learned that ?power alone, even in the hands of the working class or its institutional surrogates, does not necessarily solve problems,? and ?proletarians and their institutions?could be as corrupt, self-seeking, and tyrannical as the bourgeoisie, the czars, or the fascists.? Gus therefore wrote: ?I have decided that my socialism today is an ecumenical socialism that appeals to the hands, the head, and the heart. Here at my advanced age I publicly confess that I have come to accept that trinity??

Another irony of Gus?s long and distinguished life: a Jewish socialist intellectual finally accepting the trinity, on behalf of a secular god.

The world that Gus embodied is with us no more. The labor movement he so loved and nurtured for nearly a century is a pale shadow of what it was in the last century?s middle years. The impassioned fights among various stripes of Communists and socialists, both inside and outside the labor movement, are practically unknown to trade unionists today. And the intellectual rigor he learned on the left, from his YPSL days onward, is not echoed in any contemporary American movement. His passion is needed more than ever?and no less the charm and determination that he used to search out a more just union.

(Images: Kheel Center at Cornell University/Flickr cc)