It was from unemployed movement networks that the core organizers for the Emerson drive found each other.

Communist Party member Bob Manewitz was hired at Emerson in February 1936. Manewitz was active in the relief protests and in labor support work of the early 1930s, including the nut pickers' struggles and the American Workers Union campaigns (left).

Around May 1936 Manewitz contacted Lou and George Kimmel, two Emerson paint shop workers he knew from relief organizing. The Kimmel's father had been a socialist steelworker in Granite City, Illinois, across the river, blacklisted for his activism in the WWI period. They were well known in the plant mainly for their boxing talents. (Lou held the light heavyweight amateur championship for the Missouri Valley for two years)

Both brothers worked as spray hands in the fan line (pictured above) in Emerson's Building H, where Manewitz worked on the fan assembly line. George's boxing career was harmed when he "wrecked his arm" at Emerson as a spray gun operator.

In Spring 1936, when Lou and George Kimmel asked Bob Logsdon to help organize, he eagerly joined the core group. Logsdon came from a small coal town in Illinois. He came to St. Louis in 1923, but until the Green Depression, he had little thoughts about unions. He experienced the insecurity of temporary jobs, common for the youth who made up much of the CIO movement.

In the early 1930s he "started to go to the [St. Louis] library on Jefferson and Lafayette. Read a little of The Nation, The New Republic . . . .I think they also had The Daily Worker. . . . And I got interested in that sort of business." He started to question the logic of capitalism, which used up the lives of so many workers, leaving their human potential wasted. Logsdon joined the Socialist Party. It was through his involvement in the American Workers Union and the Socialist Party that other union activists signalled out Logsdon for the initial organizing committee. When Lou and George Kimmel asked him in the spring of 1936 if he wanted to come to the meeting with them, he eagerly joined them.

Though he was assigned at the time as an Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) organizer, Sentner guided the small group of organizers. Sentner urged the CIO to concentrate on organizing the electrical industry in St. Louis, a plan he had initially proposed to the CP in late 1935: "[I]t is my opinion that this industry, if organized . . . would revitalize the entire St. Louis labor movement."

Sentner's focus on organizing Emerson was based on their understanding of the local political economy: "the wages paid in this industry set the pattern for the community and almost all other industries." The electrical industry was the open shop stronghold: "the industry was almost totally home-owned and had direct ties through their managements with banks and other industrial establishments." It had become a major industry in the area, composed of many semiskilled and unskilled workers as well as a large group of skilled metal workers.

Sentner's prediction would be proven correct, but not because the national CIO acted on Sentner's advice. While the national leaders of the CIO kept their focus on the steel drive, a self-organized core of electrical workers at Emerson Electric and the local Left brought results at Emerson.

Skilled workers like Frank Schlieman (right) became an important leader of the drive, though Manewitz noted that they were not "the backbone of the effort."

The assembly line workers who initiated the drive coaxed representatives of the tool and die workers and other skilled workers into leadership roles in the UE.

When Schlieman, a tool and die maker and International Association of Machinists member, agreed to join the UE-CIO in the late fall of 1936, he moved quickly into a leadership position.

Schlieman's authority also derived from his status as an elder worker, from his association with the company union movement and with the failed independent union drive of late 1935-early 1936.

In December 1936, the union decided to run union candidates for the ERP board, the Emerson-sponsored "company union," Schlieman was elected president.

The small number of black workers in the plant also soon gained a representative (Troy Lee, right) in the organizing committee, whereas they had been excluded from the company union.

Sentner began to devote more of his time to the drive despite his official position as an SWOC organizer. Clara Warnick, who was district director of the local Young Communist League and had helped organize the famed 1936 cotton pickers' strike in Arkansas, got a job at Century. She was soon "discovered" and fired.

Henry Fiering, a young CP member, then got hired into Century. Fiering's father had been a blacklisted socialist. He grew up in New York but had been apolitical until 1931, when rounds of unemployment and youth activism in New York jolted him.

He became active in the CP because Communists were "action-oriented, results-oriented" in struggles. Fiering came to St. Louis because of his romantic attachment to Warnick (whom he would later marry). For a time he was involved in the unemployed movement and the American Youth Congress.

But by late 1936 he was one of the local CP activists hired for the SWOC drive as an organizer at American Foundry.

But when Fiering was needed at Century, leaving SWOC was not a difficult decision. He recalled the local SWOC director's methods as less than satisfying: "My work was to sign cards. They had their own MO [modus operandi] as far as organization was concerned. I would be assigned to go out to visit people individually and sign them up. There was no such thing as the kind of organization I had looked forward to."

In late 1936, the CIO movement was given an enormous boost when workers at General Motors (GM) plant in Flint, Michigan, launched a sit-down that catalyzed, within a month, into a nationwide strike against GM.

St. Louis's GM plant shutdown (pictured, left) was accomplished by a community coalition, composed of AWU members, Emerson union activists, miners from southern Illinois, and other local activists.

They congregated at the plant gates and successfully appealed to auto workers to remain outside.

insert: photo of NMTA report

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