The key figure in the district's anticommunist coalition was James Click, Emerson's chief shop steward,

Click, 28 years old in 1945 when he began the drive, came of age during the Depression, and had considered himself "something of a socialist" in the 1930s. He contended years later that Sentner's "flip-flops" on foreign policy clearly influenced by fealty to the Soviet Union caused him to become so determined to oust Sennter. But Click had determined to contest Sentner long before the party's change of line in mid-1945, in an alliance with new forces emerging in the district.

Shop steward Thomas Knowles argued that without the Communist issue, Click would never have been a viable candidate: "he seemed like an egghead rather than a union leader."

Lloyd Austin recalled:

Click told me he was concerned about some of the people who were coming into the union during the war. [He] saw [that] they were opportunistic," referring especially to some who wanted to stir up discontent to gain leadership positions and take the local out of the UE and into rival unions they had belonged to before the war.

Austin recalled that "Click was really worried about the in-fighting and about their motivations but wasn't enough of a leader to bring everybody all together." Sentner tried to bring all factions together on a "constructive" program, "but Click was too afraid of getting together with Sentner, for fear of being red-baited” by the faction.

Austin and others on the Left tried to get a unioneducation program for new workers.

Click expressed support for the them privately and according to Austin , assured him: "Don't worry, Lloyd, these people will be gone after the war, and we'll be in charge."

But then Click "left me and people like Bob Heim [a shop steward close to Sentner] out in the cold. He thought it would label him. . . . Then come[s] the end of the war, and we found he had gone to the other side. When he saw they [the new group] were getting too strong, he went on their side, and he used anticommunism [to unify their group.] He double-crossed us."

The leftists in the local, such as Heim, who had backed Click on Sentner's and Logsdon's advice became an increasingly isolated group whose strongest adherents felt under siege as they were targeted for their support of Sentner.

Bob Heim, 1942 photo

Logsdon recognized that the Left had miscalculated about the Emerson local and about Click, the source of the anticommunist drive.

The raw feelings Logsdon still held years later, as he lambasted Click as a "plain, out and out opportunist" who "used" the anticommunism issue to advance himself.

Logsdon charged that Click, worried about "tints and hues" of his own association with socialism, was forced to "out-red-bait the red-baiters. . . . Truthfully, I don't think he could stand to take the heat. Heat got hot in the kitchen. The red-baiting got hot. He didn't want to get tarred. He wanted to get ahead. So, he could serve two purposes. He could get away from [being] red-bait[ed], and he could get a better job."

Leaders who supported Sentner also argued that their direct experience with him showed that he was not attempting to exert Communist "control" of the local. William Cuthbert assured Maytag workers: "I have yet to see or hear Bill Sentner using the United Electrical union for purposes of the Communist Party."

When the voting concluded in late October, Sentner and William Cuthbert (of the Maytag local) won the contest by a margin of nearly three to one. Only Emerson Local 1102 and Century Local 1108 voted overwhelmingly for Click and Lenhardt. Small Arms Local 825 and Wagner Local 1104, the other two large locals in St. Louis, gave a majority vote to Sentner, as did all but one other local. 54 While a group of black workers signed and distributed a leaflet titled "William Sentner, the Man Who Fights for the Rights of the Negro People," Click's faction went to Mt. Carmel, Illinois, and predicted that the Communist leaders of the district "were going to send our Negro people down" to take the jobs of white workers.