Troublemaker: Saying No to Power will strike a chord with hundreds of veteran activists and doubtless thousands of others who have crossed paths with, seen or heard of, our memoirist Frank Emspak. This volume provokes new questions about how a handful of unique members of the 1960s political generation found their way, did their work, and now understand their lives.
Emspak is the son—and arguably scion (if such a word is permitted)—of one of the leading trade unionists of the 1940s. Emspak’s father, Julius, was a college student who wilfully dropped out to work in factories during the 1930s. He never admitted to being a Communist, but was surely surrounded by and supported by Communists in the early electronics industry. He became a founder of the new United Electrical Workers (UE), not the largest of the CIO unions but the one with the highest proportion of women members. (It has also proved to be the one with the longest track record, right up to the present, of courageous action in the face of hostile businessmen, local government officials and even or especially sometimes, conservative union officials). The George Meanys and Lane Kirklands of the world tried hard to murder the UE, but did not succeed.
One of the most telling passages in this memoir relates young Frank telling his father about his own campus activities and his father resisting, no doubt because of the severe persecution that had fallen upon him and by extension, the family. The punishing effects of Congressional investigations, threats of imprisonment, and endless stress finally—as father and son were completing their dialogue—brought on an untimely demise that robbed American life of one of industrial unionism’s genuine heroes.
Frank Emspak
Frank tells this anecdote in a matter-of-fact way, one more incident in a rambling life. He had grown up in the less fancy parts of Westchester County, New York, and set off for college at the University of Wisconsin (UW) in Madison, where he would meet socialist intellectuals galore, many of them Jews from Greater New York. These intellectuals had mostly restricted their political activity to a debating club until the rise of the local civil rights movement during the early 1960s. Frank joined in at a moment when the Vietnam War raised the possibility of a larger impulse on campus.
That Emspak became a leader of the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam is passed over here, likely because it crashed early: civil rights movement leaders insisted upon a continuing close relationship with a Democratic Party that, in the middle 1960s, largely supported the war.
Soon enough, when the war came to campuses (and the UW campus, in particular), with massive strikes and assorted mobilizations, Emspak was on the frontlines—as a photo on the book’s cover reveals (Frank is seen on the photo’s right). Here, we see students respond to police moments after an assault upon peaceful protesters sitting in at the prospective site of job interviews for the Dow Chemical Company, notorious makers of Napalm. (Reviewer’s disclosure: I, too, am somewhere in the rebellious crowd, one more “Student for a Democratic Society” and leaflet-writer of the day. So was Paul Soglin, who would, six years later, become mayor of Madison and remain mayor for three separate time spans during much of the next fifty years.)
It was not unusual for graduates, even Ph.D. candidates, to abandon campus for the workplace in the early 1970s. Emspak was one of them, leaving Wisconsin for Massachusetts at the end of 1971. But there was no revolution this time around. Despite intense labor restlessness and the emergence of women, people of color, and young workers frequently in the leadership, an economic recession and other political forces quashed labor gains. Factories closed, unions shrank, and the promise of a transformed labor movement nearly disappeared from sight as labor bureaucrats cracked down on rebel movements, eclipsing wider hopes.
At the local base, in many places, factory and community struggles nevertheless continued and, at least sometimes, found fresh energies in the new generations.
Describing his life and work in and around Lynn, Massachusetts during the 1970s and 1980s, Emspak has a lot of interesting things to say about the changing work process in the local GE factory, and within the International Union of Electrical Workers, ironically the anti-communist rival union that had drained UE of most of its membership during the 1950s.
In 1972, Emspak went to work in United Shoe Machinery Corporation, at a plant earlier represented by UE. By 1975, he was able to get hired at GE’s Wilmington, Massachusetts, factory, part of the giant Lynn GE complex, with its workers represented by IUE. Four years later, Emspak was elected to the executive board of the IUE local in Wilmington. Like his father, he became a leader of sorts among manufacturing workers. Older memories of militancy did remain in the factories, and younger generations radicalized on campus or off proved eager to assert themselves.
Emspak remains ahead of the time in connecting the need for new labor strategies for a progressive, even radical approach to the industrial and post-industrial, working class era ahead.
Emspak also discovered that his decisions on particular union contracts did not coincide with those of the Communist Party, with which he had been quietly affiliated. Using his background in labor history (he had earned his Ph.D. in the meantime), he had developed a special grip on the issues of gender and comparable worth, as they emerged sharply at the workplace. So did the issues around rapidly changing technology, and the efforts of unions from the United States to Scandinavia and beyond to resist the cost-cutting “efficiency” that the companies had in mind.
He learned soon enough that the much-boasted “factory of the future” was actually destined for a short life-span. Emspak and his fellow activists reached their peak influence during the second half of the 1980s, but he remains ahead of the time in connecting the need for new labor strategies for a progressive, even radical approach to the industrial and post-industrial, working class era ahead.
Emspak’s return to Madison and his role in the UW School for Workers together provide a kind of climax, along with his shift to labor radio and the national project of Workers Independent News, offering blue collar news to radio stations around the United States and beyond. He had (and still has) skills in a wide range of labor issues tapped by assorted media outlets, if not the support or opportunities to offer these skills to the range of workers and unions so badly in need of them. He admits to being daunted by obstacles, but at a personal level undefeated. It has been a life worth living and writing about.
Editor’s Note: Buhle authored the preface for Troublemaker.