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History |
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From THE FIGHTING MACHINISTS, A CENTURY OF
STRUGGLE
by Robert G. Rodden |
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The Wharton Years
Wharton had made his reputation not only in the IAM, but
throughout the labor movement for his part in the 1911 strike
against the Illinois Central and Harriman Lines. As the IAM's
representative to this early stab at coordinated bargaining, he
became everybody's choice to head the six shop crafts negotiating
team--the so-called Federation Federations. Later, when these six
organizations created a formal Railway Employee's Department in the
AFL, they elected Wharton as first president. When he agreed to be
drafted to lead his own union, he took a substantial cut in
salary--from $10,000 to $7,500 a year. he did so to halt the
dissension which, as he said, "was wrecking the organization to
a degree no outside agency had been able to accomplish."
However, he made it clear, both to the Executive Council and the
1928 Grand Lodge Convention, that he would not uproot his family and
would continue to consider Chicago his home. This meant daily
reimbursement for "out-of-town" expenses whenever he was
in Washington. It also made him vulnerable to sniping by verbal
sharpshooters in the local lodges.* |
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*And led to a
referendum in 1933 which cut off Wharton's daily out-of-town
expense allowance by defining Washington, D.C. as the
designated home base for the International President. |
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Wharton was born in 1873 into a mixed Anglo-Indian homesteading
family on a remote and windswept plain in Kansas. While still a
young boy his mother was widowed when his father got lost in a
blizzard and froze to death. At fourteen he began a machinist
apprenticeship on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. Upon becoming a
journeyman in 1890 Wharton joined the IAM and went to work for the
Union Pacific soon after. There he helped organize several lodges
and was a leader of a strike against that road in 1893. Over the
next several years he remained active in union affairs and was
elected to a number of local and district lodge offices. In 1903, at
the age of thirty, he became general chairman of the district
representing IAM members on the Missouri Pacific Railroad.
While President of the Railway Employee's Department Wharton
also served as labor representative on a number of federal agencies,
including the Railroad Labor Board. his scorching dissents to the
wage-cutting, rules-wrecking decisions that touched off the 1922
shop craft strike made him a hero to shop craft workers. Wharton
has been described as "short in stature with a broad forehead
and piercing eyes." He was normally stiff, formal and correct
in his relationships with others.* Old-time employees remembered him
as somewhat distant and |
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*However soon
after assuming office Wharton took care of Johnston, who had
no pension or other source of income, by arranging for a
position with the IAM-owned Mr. Vernon Bank. As noted the bank
went under following the '29 crash and Johnston died penniless
at the age of 63 in 1937. |
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aloof. Reportedly Wharton rarely felt comfortable with the more
friendly and outgoing Davison. Relations between the two became
increasingly strained, so much so that people working for the two
departments, the I.P. and the G.S.T., said that it was like working
for two different organizations. Even so, Wharton continued to
command enormous respect from his contemporaries in other railroad
unions.
Philosophically Wharton was a craft trade unionist in the
Gompers and O'Connell mold. Rejecting the IAM's brief
experimentation with direct political action Wharton told the
members "We will be less visionary and more practical by
concentrating our efforts in the direction of securing immediate and
material benefits." This was the Gompers creed of bread and
butter, or business, unionism in a nutshell. In laying out the
policies that would guide his administration Wharton returned to the
first principles on which Talbot had founded the union almost four
decades earlier: "To reduce strikes to a minimum to establish
cooperative relations with every employer who is willing to
recognize our association and establish mutually satisfactory
contractual relations." It was his fate to have to steer the
IAM through the most terrible depression in history. In the
beginning, though, he was fortunate in that the hemorrhaging of
membership that began in 1920 had been staunched. By 1926 membership
stabilized around 70,000. This is about what it had been in 1913 and
this is where it stayed until the collapse of the American economy
in the early 1930's. |
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The Railway Labor Act and Company Unionism, Boom and Bust,
The Seeds of The Great Depression
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History |
Comments or Suggestions? E-mail the Communications Officer
of Siouxland Lodge 1426 IAMAW
Greg Enright
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