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The Johnston Era
Johnston was thirty-seven when he took office as International
President. He was bald, short, stocky and powerfully built. Though
somewhat forbidding in appearance, he was described by those who
knew him as good natured and amiable. Johnston was well read,
commanding attention of audiences through his logic and knowledge
rather than the more florid flights of oratorical rhetoric more
common to that time.
Many members probably voted for Johnston because of his record
and reputation as a Socialist, but he seems to have been less
radical than his supporters assumed. In a letter written to the
Journal as early as August, 1911, he warned that unions and
political movements should ". . . remain separate and distinct,
each working in its separate sphere for the uplift and final
emancipation of the working class." This could have been
written by O'Connell or Gompers.
Johnston's presidency was one of extremes. Under his
leadership membership fluctuated wildly, bouncing up from 67,000 in
1912 to more than 300,000 in 1919, then plunging back down to 79,000
less than five years later. During the feverish growth of World War
I Grand Lodge added a night shift because the day staff could not
keep up with the flood of lodge charterings, membership
applications, insurance claims and other paper work pouring into
Washington. Though hard-working, some say hard-driven,
Johnston never quite succeeded in closing the split in IAM ranks
that contributed to O'Connell's downfall. In taking office Johnston
immediately inherited a problem that was to keep the union in
turmoil for years to come. A few months earlier the railroad shop
craft unions had agreed to a unified strike against the Illinois
Central and Harriman lines. This was one of the labor movement's
first attempts at coordinated bargaining. The action followed
generations of fruitless efforts by various craft unions to bargain
for their own members alone. For years the various unions of
machinists, boilermakers, blacksmiths, sheetmetal workers and carmen
had negotiated one by one. And when they went on strike management
usually defeated them one by one. By joining together the shop
crafts hoped to achieve through unity what they had rarely been able
to achieve separately. Management dug in , determined to fight
coordination to the bitter end. The strike lasted forty-five months.
Originally 38,000 workers went out, including 4,000
Machinists. The shop crafts formalized their new
found cooperation by setting up a "Federation of
Federations" which later became the nucleus of the Railway
Employees Department of the AFL. A machinist, Arthur O. Wharton,
General Chairman of the IAM's district on the Missouri-Pacific, was
chosen to head the union's negotiating team. Delegates to
the Davenport convention approved a special assessment, $2.50 for
journeyman, $1.25 for apprentices, to help defray weekly benefits
for the striking railroaders. GST Preston later reported that the
Harriman-Illinois Central strike quadrupled the Grand Lodge's
"pay roll." Although he described the response to the
assessment as "perhaps the most liberal experienced by our
association" it was not nearly enough to support such a long
and exhausting battle. As the strike dragged on, benefits
were reduced from $8 to $6 and then to $4 a week. After two years
and more than $700,000 paid out, strike benefits were suspended
altogether. Still the railroad machinists refused to give up. They
voted almost two to one to carry on. When Johnston finally called
the strike off six months later, he was denounced and reviled in IAM
railroad lodges throughout the industry. |
