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The Go-Go Years
1965~1969
In June, 1965, Hayes and Walker retired together
with great fanfare amid flourishes of banquet oratory and showers of
gifts. In retrospect the Hayes' years seem to have been a golden era
for the IAM. Under his leadership the unions' prestige and influence
reached a peak both in the AFL-CIO and in the halls of government.
These were years of great progress for both the union and its members.
Between 1949 and 1965 membership brew from 518,000 to 875,000, from
1,734 lodges to 1,942 lodges, from total assets of $6.5 million to
$29.5 million. More importantly the percentage of members covered by
pension plans rose from less than 5% to more than 50%, those with
health and welfare coverage from 27% to 90%.
Of Elmer Walker it was said that while he had many
disputes in his long career, non one ever questioned his honesty.
Serving during years in which per capita remained constant while
expenses rose steadily, he carefully guarded the IAM's resources.
Members sometimes accused him of squeezing each nickel until the
buffalo bellowed. When he took over the union's books in the summer of
1959, the strike fund was scrapping bottom with only $561,000 to serve
a union of more than 800,000 members. With the fund reorganized and
despite paying out some $15 million in benefits during his six years
as GST, he left a $10 million reserve for his successor. Walker spent
his retirement years at his home in Silver Spring, Maryland,
occasionally releasing his pent-up energies in angry letters to
editors and politicians. Finding little satisfaction in retirement he
suffered a stroke and died shortly after attending the 1968 Grand
Lodge Convention in Chicago.
Hayes, always as much at ease with himself as with
others returned to his native Wisconsin where he savored retirement to
the fullest, playing penny ante poker and fishing the Northern lakes
into his early eighties.
Matt DeMore--Vesuvius from Cleveland
Matthew DeMore
1965-1969
Walker's successor, Matt DeMore, was a departure
from Machinist tradition. All previous GST's, beginning with Dawley
almost eighty years earlier, had embarked on formal apprenticeships,
aiming fro journeyman machinist status, at an early age. DeMore's
entry into the trade was indirect.
Born in Cleveland in 1903, Matt DeMore began
peddling papers in a tough East Side neighborhood at the age of nine
and was clerking in a hardware by the time he was eleven. After
knocking around at various jobs including blacksmith helper on the
Michigan Central Railroad in Detroit and motorman on a Cleveland
streetcar line, he got his growing family through the Depression
working as a maintenance machinist at a company that later became a
division of General Electric.
In 1935, DeMore led his fellow workers into Local
Lodge 439. He advanced rapidly, first to the presidency of the local
in 1936 and to directing business representative of District 54 in
1938. Over the next twenty-three years DeMore built District 54 into
one of the IAM's largest and most progressive units. In the early
'40's he once had his skull cracked when mounted police charged an IAM
picket line in a memorably bloody strike at the Pipe Machinery Co.
Before being elected to the Executive Council in 1961, DeMore became
well-known throughout the union as a member of the Law Committee at
five consecutive Grand Lodge Conventions and a president of the Ohio
State Council of Machinists. When he came on the council, Hayes
assigned him to New York to head the Northeast Territory. When he was
brought to Grand Lodge to serve as resident GVP many speculated that
Hayes was grooming DeMore as his successor. If so, he failed to
persuade the rest of the council to ignore the claim of Siemiller's
long seniority. A number of other council members were in contention
for the GST post but when the council finally reached agreement upon a
slate for the 1965 balloting, Siemiller was at the top of the ticket
with DeMore in the second spot.
Solidly muscular and compact in stature, DeMore was
warm and amiable by nature but could erupt like a roaring volcano if
provoked. he had a deep, rumbling, booming voice that could shake the
walls and carry for blocks. Whether in a convention hall or at a
bargaining table, Matt DeMore needed no electronic amplification to
make his point.
About the time he took over as GST, the IAM's new
electronic brain, the Univac III, was ready to become fully
operational. DeMore made certain the new technology was put to maximum
use, not only in keeping membership records and mailing lists, but in
speeding the printing and mailing of strike benefits and providing
swift retrieval of information on bargaining agreements covering
workers in more than 15,000 work places.
Roy Siemiller--Anything But An Old Shoe
Until Roy Brown took himself out of the picture by
crossing swords with the rest of the Executive Council at the 1960
Grand Lodge Convention, he seemed destined to follow Hayes as
International President. Roy Siemiller admitted as much at a breakfast
meeting with the Grand Lodge staff in Washington the morning after he
took office. Despite speculation about DeMore and others, Siemiller's
seniority on the Council and his successful seventeen years as head of
the IAM's key Midwestern territory gave him the edge needed for
Council endorsement when the chips were down. When elected he was
unknown nationally and widely under-rated by the press. One magazine
described him as, "a fairly unobtrusive, old-shoe choice for
International President." Roy Siemiller quickly proved to be
neither unobtrusive nor an old shoe. In a few short years he zoomed
from relative obscurity to a national reputation as one of the labor
movement's most militantly hard-nosed leaders, a figure one reporter
described as "constantly snarled in controversy and apparently
thriving on it."
Tall, lean and bald, Siemiller peered like a
quizzical (or, when irritated, a querulous) hawk over glinting,
rimless spectacles His conversation was salted with such homespun
phrases as, "It don't make no nevermind," and "We
busted them guidelines to smithereens."
Christened Paul LeRoy, Siemiller was born in
September 1904 on a homestead close by the Platte River in central
Nebraska. His father was a Civil War veteran who served at various
times with the 4th Iowa Infantry and the 51st Missouri cavalry. While
Roy was still a boy his father left the farm to an older brother an
began an odyssey that took the family westward and eastward before
finally settling down in Arkansas. Striking out on his own in the
old-time "strive and succeed" tradition of a Horatio Alger
hero, young Roy left school at an early age to become a Western Union
messenger. Spotting an "Apprentice Wanted" sign in the
window of a machine shop where he was about to make a delivery, he
removed his Western Union cap, went in, fibbed about his age and
talked himself into working nine hours a day at 11¢ an hour (with, as
he later said, "no deducts"). After completing his
apprenticeship and serving a hitch in the Navy, he went to work for
the Rock Island Railroad in Herrington, Kansas. Though not yet an IAM
member Siemiller joined the parade when union members marched out in
the big shopmen's strike of 1922. With no other jobs in sight
Siemiller bummed around as a farm hand before finding work as a
machinist in Port Arthur, Texas. He was initiated into Local Lodge 823
in September 1929 just in time for his job to be wiped out by the
stock market crash a couple of months later. Again taking to the road
he eventually wandered into the Ozark town of Harrison, Arkansas,
where he pounced upon a rare opening in the machine shop of the
Missouri-Arkansas Railroad.
Having kept up his IAM membership Siemiller tried
to find other IAM members. He learned that a few years earlier the
only IAM local lodge in the area became defunct following a strike in
which a mob of company-incited vigilantes hung the financial secretary
from a railroad bridge.
With Roosevelt and the NRA creating a more
favorable climate for unionism, Siemiller became the catalyst for a
union revival in the Harrison shops. After organizing enough
machinists to carter Lodge 1093 he was elected general chairman and
negotiated the IAM's first contract with the Missouri-Arkansas line.
When Siemiller began to help organize the other shop crafts, Wharton
began hearing about the IAM's you live wire down in Arkansas. Deciding
to check for himself, he arranged a fishing trip to the Ozarks where,
after looking Siemiller over, Wharton hired him to help in the
organizing drives that were beginning to gather steam in all
directions. After a tryout as a temporary organizer Siemiller was
given a permanent appointment to the GLR staff in 1937.
As International President, Siemiller immediately
set out to lay the groundwork for a new referendum on the per capita
and staff salary proposals that were shot down by the members
following the 1964 Grand Lodge Convention. He began by going out to
build support at the grass roots. Unconcerned by ceremony or such
considerations as the dignity of his office, Siemiller reveled in the
give and take camaraderie of the lodge hall. Meanwhile back at Grand
Lodge, looser, less formal relations between the front office and the
staff were signaled the day the new IP came to his des coatless,
tieless and decked out in a steward's sport shirt, complete with full
color Machinist emblems across both front and back.
In stumping for rank-and-file support for the per
capita increase, Siemiller later recalled, "I didn't let my shirt
tail hit my back till I covered all the U.S. and Canada like the
morning dew." A reporter recording a characteristically
rip-snorting Siemiller speech at a banquet of the Pennsylvania State
Council of Machinists in Scranton, described Siemiller's itinerary:
"After shaking hands and patting backs, he was off again, flying
first to Chicago, then San Francisco, then back to IAM Headquarters in
Washington."
Hitting the road time and again throughout the fall
and winter, Siemiller sat in on local lodge meetings, talked to
district lodge stewards and carried the gospel to every state council
and regional conference in sight. In covering on of these meetings the
Wall Street Journal described Siemiller as "an animated,
colorful speaker who would make grammarians cringe but whose earthy,
thigh-slapping humor and straight-forward, gutsy leadership appeals to
his blue collar constituency." Siemiller was also described as
being "as subtle as a bass drum, as diplomatic as a storm
trooper, as meek as a monarch."
Seizing upon a spectacular new version of rock
dancing, known as "go-go", that featured strobe lighting and
non-stop, hip-swinging, disc-displacing gyrations, Siemiller set out
to reshape "the good gray Machinist" (as LIFE
magazine once called the IAM), into a "go-go" union. Soon,
stewards and members everywhere sported the large, brightly colored
buttons with the "go-go" logo emblazoned across the
Machinists' traditional M. The "go-go" union theme was
repeated over the next few years in buttons, organizing leaflets,
Machinist editorials, posters, matchbook covers and dozens of other
ways that would attract public attention.
In January, 1966, a little over a year after the
members rejected convention-proposed increases in per capita and staff
salaries, a far larger turnout responded to the IAM's new
"go-go" image by reversing the results of the previous
count, voting roughly 80,000 to 50,000 to raise monthly per capita
50¢ and give officers and staff their first salary increase in nine
years.
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